Nine Volt Heart (10 page)

SUSI

L
ORD, I DIDN’T WANT to leave
my room on Sunday morning. It couldn’t offer anything more than another
opportunity to humiliate myself.

So I sneaked out for a run, rising early. Jason lay sprawled
on the sofa and didn’t move, though he was dressed this time, thank the gods,
since I do not like the idea of him being in my house naked. The run helped
pound my thoughts in place, after falling apart the night before.

I live on the hillside above Leschi, which was a vacation
village a few generations ago. Now it’s expensive water-view property, but a
few of the old fishermen’s shacks like mine are still nestled into the
hillside, surrounded by Douglas fir, cedar, and madrona trees, offering a false
sense of woodsy isolation amid the postmodern villas and remodeled Craftsman
bungalows. When I came back here, when my father took me in after the accident,
Leschi felt like home. I could walk the steep, meandering streets under the
trees, admire others’ gardens, or run along the lake. Men still come out to fish
from the wooden piers in the morning mist, the old woman down the block still
walks her Pug at seven a.m., and kids still ride bikes through blackberry-lined
alleys, just as I did twenty years ago.

After the accident, when I was well again physically, all
that remained was music and long walks in Leschi. I took this job teaching
before I had finished mourning my lost life—Angelia led me to it, since she was
also making a career shift. What saved me from drowning in grief was creating a
curriculum I was proud of and working with kids who love music.

I’ve come to see the past as just one kind of a life, where
I had inappropriately loaded all my hopes. Yes, it was a grander world than the
simple one I live in now, but I never fit anyway. Maybe I would have pushed
myself to the next level, but maybe that last wonderful year was a fluke and I
would have had to make a career out of being third on the left in the chorus. I
never planned to teach, because I had only the Juilliard model as a reference,
and I’d never have fit in that world either. I don’t think I’m afraid of
competition at the university level. In my former life, I scrapped hard to end
up where I did. Those aspirations have been replaced by helping others to find
how music fits in their lives.

What I miss: the singing. And the applause.

That is what made me cry for the first time in months, when
the audience shouted “Bravo!” for the chorus. Through the whole program, I felt
happy enough to be sitting in the audience. I witnessed it in the same mode as
one would listen to a CD, letting the music carry me away. I was fine. After
the intermission, I even lost the sense of that man sitting so close that I
could hear him breathe and feel the heat from his body. It was my first venture
hearing live music, other than what my students perform, and I enjoyed it. I
let the music rule my response and sensibilities.

Then the applause came, like I will never hear again.
Grieving for lost worlds, I fell apart again as Randolph’s grandfather patted
my shoulder.

I’d rationalized all of it by the time I came back to the
house from my morning run, though I dreaded facing Jason, since he must have
heard me the night before. Though, bless him, he hadn’t said a word or tried to
comfort me. Good god, but I hate it when people try to comfort me. Arms around
me feel like steel bands.

Whispered condolences feel like they want to suck what is
left of the breath from my lungs.

~

When I came in after my run, Jason was cooking breakfast, as
if he lived there. Sons of the Pioneers played on the stereo, and he was
singing along, matching the harmony, as if he lived there, too.

I finished my shower and joined him. He turned down the
volume on the stereo, but still sang “Rye Whiskey” while he served up French
toast and coffee. He continued his teasing banter, as if neither the concert
nor the debacle on the beach had occurred, which was comforting.

“Who are we begging today, Susi, besides our luncheon with
that barracuda from the board of trustees?”

“There is a teacher at Cornish who says he remembers you
from Prescott. He represents a collective of teachers and musicians who
promised to contribute. Then there’s the luncheon. Late in the afternoon
there’s a benefit concert our students are putting on. You can skip that.”

“I wouldn’t miss it. I said I’d help, didn’t I?”

He kept me rapt in conversation over the curriculum, which
he spread out on the kitchen counter, asking me questions about the directions
in each segment, making me explain choices against alternatives he presented,
as if this were my master’s thesis and he was the committee against which I had
to defend it.

“Susi, it’s like you stopped at Haydn when considering
influences on modern symphonic music. You ignore certain folk traditions, and
you have nothing from the Northwest except songs Woody Guthrie maybe wrote here
during the Depression.”

“Like what?”

“Local folk music. The Sonics. The Wailers. The Screaming
Trees. Isaac Scott. Jo Miller and Ranch Romance. The Melvins. Bing Crosby.”

“Bing Crosby?”

“He’s from Tacoma. Went to Gonzaga. You can hear the
influences when Eddie Vedder does mellow stuff.”

“Who is Eddie Vedder?”

“Never mind. I was exaggerating.”

“Someone else will teach that part.”

“You already convinced me to do it, Susi. I won’t back out
now.”

There wasn’t time in that discussion to be distracted by
anything, except he hadn’t shaved, so by the end of our friendly discourse, I
couldn’t look at his mouth without thinking about testosterone.

JASON

P
AUL HARRIS. I COULDN’T believe
it when Susi drove us over to the Cornish campus, parked in a back alley, and
dragged me into the gamelan shed. Paul looked up when we entered, flashing as
much surprise as I felt.

“Jason.” He grabbed my forearm in one of those grown-up
versions of a hippie handshake. Susi retreated to the sidelines, where she sat
with a notebook, oblivious to everything else while we talked. “I misunderstood
what Susi was asking me. She is the sort of woman you have to give whatever she
asks, so perhaps I didn’t listen closely. I thought it was just about money.
But I’m pleased to see you.”

“Thank you, Mr. Harris.”

“It’s Paul. I’m not your teacher now. Hardly was at the
time, was I?”

“Actually, I owe you a great deal. You were one of the few
sane voices at the time. And you had plenty to teach me.”

“Do you want to sit in with us this morning?”

“May I? You know percussion wasn’t my strong point.”

“Your weakest points beat most everyone else’s finest. Sit
by Jane and just feel through the first round,” Paul said. “Here’s the notation,
so you can follow along. We will play the whole set over when it’s your turn to
take up the mallet.”

A gamelan is an orchestra of instruments invented in Bali
and Java. The notation for gamelan looks like space writing, like Mr. Spock’s
annotations in the ship’s log. Yet after ten minutes of listening and watching,
I think I got it. I could join them only in the most humble way, but the
ringing of the gong and the joyousness of Balinese gamelan drew me in,
irresistibly.

What can I say? I lost three hours in the gamelan shed, and
the only intrusion of so-called reality was seeing Susi on the sidelines with
her notebook. And hearing the rain pound on the roof. Otherwise, we were lost
to rhythm and tone and that finest of all sensations, finding music with your
whole body in the midst of an orchestra of other musicians. I was drenched and
exhilarated when Susi came up during a pause in our playing.

“We have to go. You have to shower and change before our
luncheon at Gwyneth’s.”

I said goodbye to Paul, intending to return when I could,
and followed Susi to the car. The thought of breaking bread with Gwyneth—who
secretly longed to savage Susi for being more beautiful—would have been a
damper, but I was far too high from the music.

“That made up for the sex I didn’t get last night.” I blurt
these things to her and, Lord help me, she must think I do it on purpose.

“All the more reason to shower,” she said.

Which was the actual moment when I gave up and decided to go
ahead and be in love with her.

She said, “When I asked to bring you around, Paul was rather
vague about remembering you, but you seem like old friends.”

“It’s more than ten years. I almost feel like I could work
with him as an equal now. Except the gamelan part. That will take me another
ten years. I suppose he’ll be ten more years ahead of me by then.”

~

The trip to Susi’s house proved too short to shake the
sensations cascading over me like rain. I felt like a runner who had been made
to stop before cooling off. Isn’t that how people have heart attacks? I was on
the verge of at least a minor coronary, but she insisted that I shower as soon
as we came into her house.

Maybe my life could be reborn in Seattle, mixing with people
like Susi and Paul. It felt like moving to a town I had never visited. I shaved
and dressed as the man in black again, including the necktie. Susi didn’t give
me a second glance when she brushed past to close herself up in the bedroom and
dress.

While waiting, I turned on my laptop to make notes. I wanted
to share what I was feeling with a real person, so I logged on line and went in
search of my instant-messenger friends.

[email protected] was right there for me.

 
Sebastian: Ever play in a gamelan orchestra?

Chas1933: That’s what I like about you. I can be sitting here,
minding my business. Then you show up and knock me around a bit. I never had
the pleasure. Pentatonic scale, isn’t it?

Sebastian: Not all are, but I played in one this morning that
used the five-tone scale.

Chas1933: You always come up with something that makes me wish
I was young and roaming again. I’ve heard recordings but never seen one live.

Sebastian: There’s a set of instruments that carries this
interwoven melodic line, with brass keys suspended over resonating bamboo
tubes. You strike a key with a mallet and then dampen it as you strike the next
key.

Chas1933: Like a xylophone?

Sebastian: You could say, but only because there’s nothing else
like it in a Western orchestra. Another instrument is made up of a series of
small gongs mounted on string carriages. That takes two or four players, which
is more cooperation than I could manage as a rank beginner playing with
strangers.

Chas1933: Now I’m going to Google for pictures, because I’m
seeing jingle bells in my mind, and that can’t be right.

Sebastian: Nope, not right. The gamelan also has a set of gongs
with amazing, pure tones plus several pairs of pitched drums and cymbals.

Chas1933: OK, I know you play guitar. Did you pick up playing
in the gamelan quickly?

Sebastian: That interwoven melody means a faster line of music
than one man or woman alone can create, so I had to learn what everyone else
was doing simultaneously. The result brought them a lot of amusement. Though
they were too polite to laugh out loud.

Chas1933: Like trying to learn a new language as soon as you
step off the plane in another country?

Sebastian: Maybe that’s a good analogy. I had to think in a
different scale, a different rhythm, unusual manipulation of the instruments
and musical notation in Bali. It stretched way beyond patting your head and
rubbing your stomach while learning to blow bubbles and jump rope—on a
five-tone scale.

Chas1933: Man, I got to see this. Take pictures and record it
next time.
 

That’s the world I want to inhabit, where people trade ideas
and learn new things. Rather than the brave new world I live in, where people
step up uninvited and insert themselves into your personal life. The exchange
with Chas calmed me down a little, reminding me that I have friends in the
world, and all is well. And also reminding me that I needed to let my best
friend know what the heck had happened to me. I hit call-back on my phone to
raise Ian.

“Ephraim Vance.”

“Shoot.”

“Jason? I’m glad you called.”

“It was a mistake.”

“Don’t hang up.”

“I have made enough mistakes in this life already.”

“That’s what we need to talk about, Jason. Dominique says
she couldn’t persuade you to change the song list.”

“I’m never persuaded to choose songs based on whether
Dominique wants to sing them.”

“However, I want to persuade you to make a successful
record. I want at least three-quarters of the album to be new songs from you.
No covers. I want you to do the production.”

“You have the songs. She can effing learn to sing them. I
won’t have that woman standing over my shoulder again.”

“It is far more peaceful if we just pull in studio musicians
to work with her, or else have her sing against taped tracks. I learned how to
get more from her by doing things you never would.”

“Like what?”

“Coddling her. Telling her she’s good before asking more
from her. She’s cooperative when she knows how much it costs her to horse
around.”

“So you have had her in the studio alone?”

“I couldn’t trust that you’d show up, Jason. She needs to
have a new record out to keep up momentum.”

“What songs?”

“None of yours.”

“What then?”

“Cover songs. Works in the public domain.”

“That’s why you don’t want us doing cover songs on this
album.”

“It’s just business. Original music was always in your
contract. Let’s be professional, Jason.”

“Your profession is to suck musicians’ souls, and mine is to
play real music. Where does that leave us, as professionals?”

“You signed the contract, Jason. It’s your business to write
and record songs. It’s my business to make sure that your choices earn as much
money as possible for all of us.”

“Thank you for your concern.”

“And?” Ephraim fished for more from me.

“Nothing else.”

“Come on, Jason. You always want the last bitter word.”

“Hang up and leave me alone.”

“What did you mean last night when you said to watch the
phone bills?”

“That’s how I learned she was shopping herself around, in
search of better players.”

“You don’t even check your own phone bills.”

“She turned them in to the accountant as business
deductions, along with her hotel receipts and plane tickets.” I’m too chicken
to cheat on my taxes, so the accountant watches everything. “Karl called to ask
why she was entertaining at expensive hotels while supposedly visiting her
sister.”

“I see.”

“I always like it when my attorney calls to give me good
news, don’t you, Ephraim?”

“You didn’t want to keep her.”

“I didn’t mind her leaving. What got to me was all the
destruction she felt compelled to wreak on her way out. Watch your back.”