“Great. After you eat let’s go sign up for one of the trips.”
“Listen, don’t let me keep you from doing those other things.”
“You aren’t. They were my first choices too.”
“Okay. Why don’t we start with snorkeling? I don’t know how I’m going to feel with a tank on. My left arm is still an ornament.”
My breakfast arrived and I dispatched it without delay. After a second cup of coffee, I asked Jane if she was ready to go.
“Sure, let’s walk back across the beach. We can sign up at the dive shop.”
We stood up and walked down three steps to the beach. The sand was clean and white, and already warm. The water was blue. I stood there in awe. The water was blue, bright blue. In Washington you get used to water that’s green or brown. On vacation you try to find water that’s just gray. The sky was clear and just as blue, only lighter. I thought that I was seeing these things right for the first time. It was as if someone had turned up the hue on reality.
Halfway around the crescent beach from the dining room was a dock. The dive shop was to the left of it, the beach bar to the right. A number of small boats were moored to the dock. They would be for the snorkel and dive trips and the beach picnics. Farther out, a large fishing boat was anchored. It looked like a thirty-five footer rigged for six. Beyond that was a beautiful ketch, fifty feet if she was an inch. Even larger boats were anchored farther out in the mouth of the bay.
Jane went on ahead of me and bounded up the steps of the dive shop. I wandered out onto the dock and peered over the edge. The water was transparent. I was looking into ten feet of water and the sea bottom could have been in my palm. I was sure it would be like this at forty feet. Maybe I would dive here. I wasn’t likely to be back this way again.
Jane came up beside me. “Got us on the snorkel trip for this afternoon, and the dive trip tomorrow morning. You can cancel it if you aren’t up to it, no problem.”
“Great. There’s just one other thing we have to do.”
“And what’s that?” Jane was smiling.
“Talk, that’s what. That’s why I’m down here, right?”
“Yeah, that’s why we’re both down here. Why don’t we go sit on the beach and talk?”
“I’m going to change first,” I said.
“I’ll meet you on the beach then. I’ve got my suit on under this.”
“Good enough. See you in a couple of minutes.” With that I walked back to our suite. Each pair of rooms had its own walkway directly to the beach. I found ours and followed it to our stairway. Along the way I saw a number of small lizards. They darted for cover as I approached. One was cought out in the open, halfway up the stucco wall alongside our path. He froze and began to change color. His dark green color slowly changed to tan beginning with his feet, as if the wall were leaking into him. Suddenly a black bolt climbed the wall and the lizard was gone. All I saw were the scurrying feet and the long fluffy tail of the mongoose as he raced back into the bushes. He stopped for a second and turned and stared at me. The lizard was held firmly in his jaws. It still swam feebly through the air, dreaming of escape.
In the room I changed into my bathing suit. I picked up the McIlvanney, but decided that I wouldn’t be able to believe in Scottish soot and grime down here, and took The Lonely Silver Rain instead. Before leaving, I stepped up to the mirror and pulled up my shirt. One large bruise ran diagonally from my navel to my left shoulder. I’d been luckier than the lizard. Would I be any smarter? Was I ready to stop measuring myself? What was I trying to find out that I didn’t already know? If I didn’t stand tall enough now, would I ever? I stared at myself and learned nothing.
The beach was starting to fill up as I walked back to meet Jane. On the way, I heard French, German, and Spanish spoken and English with a distinctly British accent. The men I passed were all out of shape. There wasn’t a fit body to be seen. I was reminded of veal: well-fed, pale and tender. The women were generally in better shape.
I looked ahead to see how far it was to Jane’s umbrella and saw a woman approaching. She was arguing vehemently with her male companion. He, too, was quite upset and punctuated his words with both hands. Striding along, she was lovely, well tanned and trim. Most of her face was hidden under a Philadelphia Flyers cap. That and the bottom half of a white bikini was all she wore. As she passed me, I drew on all my reserves of worldliness and kept my eyes front. Well, almost front.
Jane was lying on a lounge-chair propped up on one elbow, watching the show. I pulled up a chair next to her and laid my book on the shelf built onto the umbrella post. I smiled dumbly at Jane. She nodded back.
“So?” she said.
“So what?”
“So were her breasts as perfect as they looked from here?”
“Well, you throw out the high, you throw out the low, and she still gets a …”
“That’s okay. I don’t think I really want to know.”
I settled in, stretched my legs out and dug my toes into the sand waiting for Jane to begin. Out in the center of the bay, right where the reef fell away into deeper darker water, there was a flat buoy for sunbathers to use. The only residents were a couple of pelicans. A third one flew slowly, gracefully, right above the water. Suddenly, with a corkscrew twist of its body and a last-second tuck of its wings, it dove open-mouthed into the sea. The bird sank, then bobbed to the surface, righted itself and simultaneously strained out the seawater and gulped down the fish it had caught.
“Where do you want to start?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said and stood up. “One thing I am going to do is get comfortable.” With that she undid the belt to her dress, bunched it up in her hands and pulled it off over her head. The black bikini bottom rode high over her hips and dipped as low as it could go and still be worth wearing. The top was a pair of triangles that covered her nipples. I’d seen more material on a gauze pad. Her body looked and moved like poured caramel.
I scratched the back of my neck and finally understood psychogenic blindness. Back to basics, I said. In goes the good air, out goes the bad air, in and out, one and two. “Seems to me there’s two issues here,” I heard myself saying in a voice I couldn’t quite place. Then the rest of my voicebox pitched in and I wasn’t twelve anymore.
I went on. “One is the band, Axel in particular, and the other is the deal with the label. Maybe they’re tangled up, I don’t know.”
“They are. The deal is for the band, not me or Axel, but the whole group. That means if I go along it’s got to be with the band as it is. If I nix the deal, they’re shit out of luck too.”
“Okay, first question. What’s so awful about the record company’s deal?”
“Control. It’s all a question of control. They want control over the lyrics, the cover art, performances, who the producer will be. By the time they’re done we’ll be putting out pablum that doesn’t offend or inspire anyone. The lowest common denominator rules.”
“Why are you the only one who’s upset by this? Why not the others?”
“Because it’s me they’re after. I don’t want to sound paranoid, but I’m the one who writes the songs. It’s my lyrics that make them crazy. Did you ever hear of an x-rated chord progression? A drum solo for adults only? It’s my work they want to gut, to sterilize.”
“Axel says you should let the rest of the band write some of the songs.”
“Who’s he kidding? Axel has nothing to say.”
“Are you sure?”
“Believe me. I lived with the guy. His brain gets vapor-locked trying to decide what he wants for breakfast. No, he’s just trying to make me look like the bad guy in all this, like I’m unreasonable, not the label.”
“Why do that? If the deal requires all of you, what’s the advantage to him?”
“He gets Wade and George to stay with him. If this deal falls through, he just needs a new singer and he may be able to swing another deal. Me, I’m back to square one. I have to start all over aga
in.”
“Why would Axel think he can do as well without you? You seem to think you need him more than he needs you.”
Jane nodded her head. “I’m going to tell you something that I don’t want you ever to repeat. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath, “You don’t know how I hate saying this. It’s probably Axel’s music that’s more responsible for our popularity then my words. In case you hadn’t noticed, I don’t have the sunniest view of things. There’s not a big market for that. Oh, there’s a market, sure. On my own I’m a cult act. It’s Axel’s music that opens up the audience for us, that makes us viable as a national major label act. If you split us up, none of us will do as well as we can together. But Axel will probably recoup more of our audience than I will.”
“So there’s some truth to what they’re saying. You are holding them back.”
“Yeah, I guess I am. I just want them to wait a while. Let’s grow on our own terms. Then we can dictate to a label. Maybe we won’t have to give up these things if we’re patient.”
“Couldn’t it go the other way around? If you bend on some things now, get national exposure, and sell well, wouldn’t you be in a better position to dictate terms for the next album? You’d already have your audience.”
“Yeah, but we’d have to have a string of successes under our belt before a label would indulge us like that. I couldn’t spend years turning out crap just to convince someone to give me a chance to do what I really want. It’s easier to hold on to control than it is to get it back.”
“Are you certain that the label will interfere with your songs?”
“Yeah. They’re giving us a lot of money, so they have to sell a lot of albums to make it back. Our making the ‘hit’ list worries them already. They’re afraid we’ll bomb in the Bible Belt. Also I’ve finished writing almost all of the songs for our next album and I know there are some things they aren’t going to like.”
“Do you have to have all the control? Is it that important to you?”
Jane looked away. She saw a waiter walking by and motioned him over. He stood between us, drink-tray in hand. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Banana daiquiri.”
“Sir?”
“Salty dog.”
“Thank you. Room number?”
“Forty,” I said.
He handed me the bar chit to sign and then moved on.
Jane dug her toes into the weave of the lounge-chair.
“Can I give up some control? Does it have to be my way or not at all? Were those the questions?”
“You got it.”
“The answers are no and yes. Next question.”
“Not good enough. The next question is why no and yes?”
“It has to be that way. That’s all. It just has to.”
“What would happen if it wasn’t? What are you afraid of?”
“Nothing. I’m not afraid of anything.” She spun onto her side, facing me. Her mouth was pinched into a thin line and her cheeks were red.
“Are you sure you don’t want to take that back? You don’t sound tough, you sound brittle … and foolish.”
“Fuck you. You don’t know shit about me.”
“You’re right, I don’t. We did this once before. I asked you a question you didn’t like and you dismissed me. Well, now I’m your resident sounding board. You want me to help you, you’ve got to help me. If I ask you a question it’s because I think the information is important. Second time I ask you a question is the last time. Are we understood here?”
On that note the waiter returned with our drinks.
Jane knocked back a good bit of her daiquiri. “Yeah, we’re understood. What do you want to know?”
“Let’s start with who the hell are you? The cop called you Miss Summers. Are you Jane Summers?”
“Yeah, that’s me, Jane Summers. Savannah Jane Summers, to be exact.”
“How’d you get Savannah for a first name? It’s pretty unusual.”
“No it isn’t. It’s downright strange, but I like it. My parents told me that’s where I was conceived. Thank God it wasn’t Poughkeepsie. It was probably the last thing they ever agreed on.”
“Are you the baby?”
“That’s right. Sweet Baby Jane, that’s what my daddy used to call me.” More drink disappeared.
“You said he’s dead. How long?”
“That depends on what you mean by dead. When they buried him and where, I don’t know. Maybe he’s on the mantel in my mother’s house. It’d be easier for her to hate him if he’s close by. No long trips to the cemetery so she could kick his stone.”
“Why did you say it depends on what you mean by dead?”
“There was an accident. He was drinking. Wrapped himself around a tree. Brain damage, they said. When he came home from the hospital all he could do was sit in that wheelchair. You had to feed him, dress him, change him. That was the first time he died.
“Mom took real good care of him though. She never let any of us do anything. Everybody said to put him away, get on with things. Not my mother. She had all that hate inside of her. She had to see him like that every day. She had to know that he was ruined, that he hadn’t mended some in the night. That he was as trapped in that body as she was with him and us kids.”
“You’re pretty hard on her.”
“No I’m not. You weren’t there. You never saw the times she dragged us out and stood us in front of him, pointing her finger at him, yelling ‘Do you want to wind up like this?’ every time we disobeyed her.”
“When did you leave home?”
“Sixteen. Leave home is putting it nicely. I was thrown out. My mother got my stuff together, put it in a suitcase and had my brothers carry me kicking and screaming out of the house. They drove me up to the highway and then my brothers, God bless ’em, threw me out of the car. There I was, down on my hands and knees, trying to stuff my clothes back into the suitcase and my mother is yelling at me ‘You’ll do what I tell you, young lady, or you won’t live under my roof.’ I told her to go fuck herself.” Jane laughed. “I’ll never forget the look on her face. She just went white, got back in the car and drove off. I threw a rock at it, but missed.”
“What did you do to piss her off like that?”
“I was singing to my father, that’s what. Every day, after breakfast, she’d wheel him out front, put him on the porch and leave him there all day. Like he was some damn plant that needed sun. We were forbidden to move him. One day I came home from school and I was singing, and I saw that he was smiling. It was the only time I’d seen him smile. So I used to wait until she was in the basement doing laundry, or at a neighbor’s and I’d go out front and sing to him. It didn’t matter what I sang, he’d smile. One time he cried. No sound you know, just big tears rolling down his cheeks. It was the only happiness he knew. So I snuck out to do it almost every day. My brothers saw me. I don’t know which one of them told her. She dragged me out in front of him and told me that she didn’t want me singing to him anymore. That it was a waste of my time, that he didn’t understand anything, and I was just upsetting him and causing her more trouble. I knew that wasn’t true, I knew he understood me. There was no way that I was going to do that to him. An hour later I was standing on the side of Highway 301, hitching a ride into D.C.”
“Is that when you became Jane Doe?”
“In my heart, yeah, I guess so. I started using it as a stage name when I was with a covers band in Georgetown.”
The rest of Jane’s drink disappeared. She put her glass down and motioned to a passing waiter.
“Like my father before me,
I have a taste for death.
I kiss his cold glass lips,
I smell him on my breath,”
I recited.
Jane shook her head. “That’s not fair. You can’t use my own words against me.”
“I’m not trying to use them against you. They just popped into my head. After
what we’ve been talking about, they made more sense to me.”
“Well, now you know. I’m a cannibal. I chew up my own life and spit it back at the audience.”
“If that’s what you’re offering them, don’t you want as big an audience as possible?”
“No, not really. It would be nice, don’t get me wrong, but I really don’t care about being popular. See, that’s the difference between me and Axel. Axel wants me to change so the group can grab all this loot. I’m not asking anybody to change for me. Just be patient and we can have it all. On our terms.”
“You are asking them to do something for you. You’re asking them to let this opportunity pass. You know, there may not be a second chance. There are never enough teats on the sow of fame. Ask Heather Heywood.”
Jane’s face hardened. “Whose side are you on, anyway? You sound like you agree with them.”
“I’m not on anybody’s side. I’m just trying to …”
“I’ve had enough talk for today. I’m going for a walk.”
Jane slid off the lounge-chair and strode away down the beach. She was much more like her mother than she knew. I sure as hell wasn’t going to be the one to tell her, though. My neck ached enough from all the fun I was having.
CHAPTER 28
Jane found me picking at the remnants of my lobster salad. She had my mask and snorkel in her hands. Over her bikini she wore a pink T-shirt.
“I thought you’d want these,” she said.
I took them from her. “Thanks.” I put them on the chair next to me.
Jane shifted her weight from one leg to the other and then back again. “Look, I’m sorry. Okay? I can be a real bitch sometimes. Let’s try to have some fun and we’ll talk about things over dinner.”
“Okay. Let’s go.” We went through the dining room to the beach. At the dive shop she picked out a mask and snorkel and I grabbed two pair of fins. People were already gathering on the dock for the afternoon trip to the reef. So far we had three companions.
The Things We Do for Love Page 14