Nine Volt Heart

by Annie Pearson

  “Goes the way you plan? The way you plan for anything, you make the fiddling grasshopper look like Solomon in all his wisdom and glory.”

  “At least I’m good at taking action. If I hadn’t come to see you today, who knows what would have happened.”

  “If you had gone home, your stalker would have just followed you there instead of bothering me. Oh, I forgot. You don’t have a home. Then, at least it would have been Cynthia dealing with that poor man instead of me.”

  “I’m not sure about that. I think he fell in love with you and came here just like I did.”

  “It isn’t love. It’s an obsession like people have, fixating on an unachievable object to make up for their own inadequacies.”

  “Look, I feel bad about it too. But I didn’t cause it. Karl and I will make sure Warren gets the professional help he needs.”

  “I wasn’t referring to your stalker.”

  “OK, Susi, stop. I’m sorry you lost your old life. I didn’t intend that to happen. But everyone knows you should be singing. You can teach any time. Except when we’re touring. Then you have to be with me.”

  “How could I ever let my professional life get involved with yours? You raise havoc all around you.”

  “Yet it always turns out all right. Ask Ian. He has let me take care of business for him for years.”

  “Jason, you live at Ian’s house. Your uncle Beau ran your business for the past ten years. Your attorney sends someone over to brush your teeth in the morning. You have a small army of people who take care of you. You can’t take care of anything more complicated than making sure you have bus fare in your pocket.”

  “That isn’t true. Who said that?”

  “Ian told me this morning, when he called to ask me to please forget that you are such a jerk. Almost everybody else called to say the same thing, to ask me to see the bigger picture.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t want to be with someone just because of sexual attraction.”

  “You’re with me because we belong together. Because we have interesting work to do together. Because being apart from each other now would be too lonely to endure. The sex is just a bonus.”

  “Maybe to you. But it’s what keeps my heart beating at night.”

  “OK, if we have to have sex to keep your heart beating, I can live with that. You can still do whatever you want the rest of the time. I would never dream of telling you what to do.”

  “That’s totally false. You are a complete dictator in rehearsal.”

  “That isn’t personal. And we don’t rehearse all the time.”

  “I wanted the rest of my life to be free of monomaniacal music directors and paparazzi and living out of suitcases. I’d have to change my whole life to be with you.”

  “It is a great life, except it used to get sort of lonely. I hope we can collaborate on ending that part. Susi, I know you love me. Karl told me. He said you cried.”

  “I did not cry.”

  “There were witnesses.”

  ~

  I tried to tell him, that when I thought about us never singing together again, the idea left me ill, barely able to breathe.

  At that moment, Jason touched me.

  He put his hand on mine, and when I looked down, I couldn’t remember what it was that had always disturbed me about his touch, because it was just his long, slender fingers grazing the back of my hand, the same way he touches the strings on my father’s Martin.

  “Susi, what’s wrong? Say something.”

  He touched my lips in that way he does, causing me to shiver.

  “Susi?”

  “I love you. That’s all.”

  100 ~ “Passionate Kisses”

  JASON

  WHEN YOU HAVE BEEN as scared as you’ve ever been in your life without time to feel the jolt of adrenalin until it’s all over, when you have had to acknowledge that you inadvertently but irreversibly altered the life of the person you love most, and when you have spent forty-eight hours discovering that nothing in your life is as it seems, then there isn’t a possible transition into eroticism. It is true that when both of you find your fingers still tingling from fear, you want to touch each other. Yet arousal and sexual response aren’t as important, or even noticeable, as other things.

  Not as important, for example, as discovering that in the daylight, her grey eyes have tiny gold flecks that seem to shine light from inside her soul. Or that the side of her lips with the tiny scars is so sensitive and has to be touched in a special way. After a month of idiotic blindness, when you realize that the athletic body you admire is shaped by nature and discipline to be one of the finest vocal instruments in the world, you want to touch it differently. It requires more than a few moments of devotion to acknowledge how the divine can manifest itself in human form.

  When you lay your hand over another person’s beating heart, and when you know that the human being in your arms loves you passionately, and that person isn’t going away, doesn’t want to be anywhere else but right there in your arms, then it isn’t eroticism that causes you to cry out or sigh. Replete isn’t how you feel at the end, but rather through every moment, with every breath. There is no actual point of climax for either of you, when the moment you first touch is the culmination and it carries on, unconnected to any ascending intensity or need for release.

  It carries you both into a shared world where touch forges bonds that nothing can break, until you are both strong enough again to move more than inches away from each other, sure your heart will keep beating if you can’t feel her heart under your hand.

  After biological necessity drove me from our shared bed, being the only power that could overcome such powerful spiritual and emotional bonding, I returned from the bathroom with the complete, divine understanding that the rhythms of our lives had merged. Susi only nodded when I explained, but then to prove my point, she went to the kitchen to make food before I could say I was starving.

  ~

  “Don’t start, Jason.”

  “I didn’t. I said a week ago I wouldn’t. Anyway, I don’t need to say anything. You have believed in your heart that our souls are already married, ever since you first went to bed with me. Your father said you were that way.”

  “How do you know my father?”

  “We have been corresponding by email for a few years. What is that smell? I’m so famished.”

  “This is an unbelievable coincidence—about my father, I mean. You, however, with amazing consistency, are always hungry.”

  “You have to believe in coincidence, Susi, even if you don’t believe in fate. Otherwise, what were you doing in Neumo’s looking for a Jason at the exact same moment that I needed to fall in love with you?”

  “The idea of you and my father discussing me is too nerve-wracking. I can’t ponder any other existential questions.”

  “We didn’t start talking about you until yesterday. Before then, music was all we had in common. Though he figured out a couple of weeks ago that you were sleeping with me. If you can call it sleeping. I don’t think I’ve a good night’s sleep since I met you. It’s cornbread, isn’t it?”

  “My father knows? Oh lord, how embarrassing. He must think—”

  “That’s how he tricked your mother into marrying him, by getting her to go to bed with him. If I had known you were that way from the beginning, it would have saved me a lot of worry.”

  “I’m what way?”

  “You have to marry every man you go to bed with.”

  “That is not true.”

  “I’m just going by what you said and what your father confirmed. If you slept with people you didn’t marry but your father doesn’t know about it, I suppose you could tell him. For my part, I don’t want to know. I want to believe that I have the long-term exclusive rights to your heart.”

  “Please just shut up.” She seemed to be about ready to serve the food, because she slammed a couple of pots on the stovetop and then banged plates down on the counter.


  “But, Susi, he bet me the first hundred dollars he earns that you would marry me. Personally, I think it is offensive to bet on women. However, I’m betting that I’ll lose and he is betting that I’ll win, so it seems morally OK. Or at least, it’s not too much in the grey area of relative values.”

  “What hundred dollars?”

  “The first money that comes from the record company advance. Chas bought the catalog of Lost Sons music. Huevos rancheros? Did you put jalapeños in mine?”

  “Yes, and queso añejo. Is Dad buying old music over the Internet?”

  “Sort of. Anyway, I’m thinking that we could get his lectures out in several alternate forms faster than the advance will pay out. So he’ll make money off his own work, rather than just off his investment. Do we get butter with the cornbread?”

  “You know the butter is in the refrigerator, and you can stop eating for thirty seconds to get it yourself. Dad will lose the bet because there is still an enormous chance that I’ll murder you before I ever marry you. Please slow down and tell me what you’re talking about.”

  “Martha has found a transcriber and an archivist who’ll begin working with Chas on Monday, so we can capture his lectures and notes. Martha is great. She can find anything. I’m surprised she didn’t find my guitar before you did. Anyway, Arlo will drive him anywhere he wants to go for his research.”

  “Arlo? It is not like you to talk with your mouth full.”

  “I have a lot to say and I’m starving. Arlo came back after he took Ian and Cynthia home last night to give us a ride to your father’s place. It turns out Arlo has a chauffeur’s license and, amazingly, an immaculate driving record. Plus, Arlo can do all the taping of Chas’s lectures, since he has so much experience illegally recording concerts. Arlo has it in his head that he can make videos, and we can publish them online and as DVDs. Why do you keep putting your hands in my hair, Susi?”

  “Because it’s so beautiful now that it’s short. I can’t help myself.”

  “If I’d known, I would have cut it a month ago. I can’t pay attention to my food if you keep doing that.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Anyway, Chas isn’t sure about video, because he thinks he’d have to get spiffed up too much. But your dad is pretty charismatic. I think the camera might like him. Whatever he and Arlo decide, I voted for moving the transcripts to the Internet as quickly as possible. I think they should publish weekly, whether it’s video or transcription.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Can you just say yes to touring with us, and we can talk about the other stuff later? Ian and Toby and everyone else—they can’t take the suspense much longer. Come with me now—I have to do a radio interview this evening. You can sing with me.”

  “On the radio?”

  “Is that compromising? Is it because of the microphones? I swear I won’t make you use one live unless you want to, but on the radio, you need electricity.”

  “After what happened yesterday, they’ll ask embarrassing questions.”

  “Nope. My old pal Quentin is doing the interview, and he knows questions about you are off limits. Come on, it’ll be fun. Afterward, you can have a late supper with me at Chas’s place. He and I have more business to discuss. Of course, you and I will have to bring the food.”

  “Why don’t I call my brother Steven, and he can join us?”

  “Um, I don’t know if I’m comfortable with that yet.”

  “I don’t know if I’m comfortable with you and Dad becoming best buddies. Oh god, you already are, aren’t you? You should wipe that butter off your lips.”

  “Come help me, Susi.”

  “No. Your tongue and lips burn from jalapeños.”

  “It’s not jalapeños.”

  101 ~ “Straight A’s in Love”

  JASON

  ARLO GOT A SECOND SUMMER job, living in Karl’s house as caretaker while Karl sells it and waits for his own divorce to be final. We are buying it, because the first floor is perfect for low-mobility individuals like Chas, and the basement is just waiting to become a studio, though Cynthia argues that I’m paying for the house a second time.

  Hiring Arlo was the first sign that Karl decided to take risks again. He vowed as to how it wasn’t a serious risk when he sold his practice to a friend and signed on to learn the music business from Ephraim. That change is just an adventure, he said, not a risk. He kept Martha as his only employee, though she’s working out of her own apartment with just a phone, high-speed Internet, and fax (for contracts) until we all get back to town. Whenever Karl joins us on the road, I get a great deal of pleasure from watching him struggle with the opportunities for casual sex that he’s offered just because he’s with the band. He’s still saying no, but he doesn’t think it’s humorous now. To sublimate, he too got a chauffeur’s license so he can drive the bus like in the old days—he says it gives him time to think about things.

  Zak moved his stuff into Ian’s basement when I moved out, although I don’t know how Cynthia can complain about me and then take on a teen-age drummer. On the road, Sonny watches out for Zak, since everyone voted me the World’s Worst Mentor, which I don’t think is fair, and I don’t think Cynthia should get to vote if she’s only with the band half the time. It works out well though, because Sonny doesn’t want to be places that eighteen-year-olds can’t go. Zak still isn’t returning to school in the fall—but hey, this isn’t an old-school MGM musical where everyone makes the proper choices for the bourgeois status quo in the end.

  In fact, what they don’t tell you in the rom-coms is that for every day of casual deceit, it takes ten days of protesting innocence and promising faithfulness and positing a probable future to gain the trust that you need for a genuine relationship. Not that I minded talking all night, every night. Or biting my lip to keep from saying, ‘You deceived me, too.’ I’ll never say it, because I got a happy ending that I didn’t deserve.

  On the other hand, Angelia and Toby are pregnant, which leaves me insanely jealous, since Susi and I are still working on that plan. We reached consensus with each other. Now we are just negotiating with fate, if you believe in that as a force in the universe. I’m not willing to trust anything more to fate, even though it’s taken me this far.

  We are going back to the studio in October—I want to do an acoustical set of just Susi and me singing Beau’s songs—and then to Europe for most of the winter, which Susi says is good because she prefers Europe in the rain. Before we left town for the summer, Zak and I passed the GED test, so I proved that I’m as good as any high school graduate. However, Susi pretended like she didn’t find that amusing. She insists now that the only schooling I need is a vocal coach, to make sure I don’t hurt my voice.

  For her own education, Susi has undertaken a summer-school remedial course in the history of rock-and-roll, and she accepted me as a tutor. She’s one of the rare women in the world who first met Bruce’s music through Nebraska. It provided a context to help her understand what happened to music between the Great Depression and when the time-travel machine dropped her in my lap. She jumped straight from intellectually comparing Hank Williams and Bruce Springsteen songs—“Mansion on the Hill”—into a seemingly physical fondness for Darkness at the Edge of Town. Sonny tried to introduce her to Black Flag, The Clash, and related influences, but she turned scholarly.

  “How can a band be the progenitor of anarchical, non-commercial rock and then have a retrospective compilation that’s a best seller?” she asked. “I don’t understand.”

  Which baffled Sonny. He continued with his historical review, only to have her ask the same questions about grunge. Lest we forget that she’s a different sort of girl, she announced early in her new adventure that she prefers Steve Earle to Bruce. “Because I identify more with Mr. Earle’s lyrics,” she said. Which leaves me uncomfortable. If I don’t stop her, we have to listen to El Corazón over and over on the bus.

  It would drive me to drink, except I tried gett
ing drunk again at our wedding in August, and I pretty much didn’t enjoy the last part of it, even if I didn’t throw up. Also, I haven’t finished learning to drive yet. Zak got his license back when he turned eighteen, and he’s teaching me, but we need Ian to rent the car in each town when we want to practice driving, since Ian is the only one among the three of us that has both a credit card and a driver’s license. Then Ian has to drive the car off the rental lot and around the corner, where he gets out and waits until we come back for him. He says there’s a limit to which elements of his life he’s willing to trust to my hands.

  The part I like best is when we roll down the windows, turn the radio up loud, and let the wind blow through while the white lines zip by and Zak beats a rhythm on the dash board.

  It reminds me of a song.

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  Find more in the Rain City Comedy of Manners series on Annie Pearson’s author page on Amazon.

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  About the Author

  Annie Pearson lives and writes in Seattle. The first pop song that affected her emotionally is “Rhythm of the Rain” by The Cascades. She posts about writing and eclectic project planning at www.anniepearson.com. She also writes the Accidental Heretics adventure series (as E.A. Stewart).