Nine Volt Heart (22 page)

SUSI

T
UESDAY, I COULDN’T FIND
parking near Ian’s and had to leave my car a couple of blocks away. I took the
shortcut up the alley to Ian’s, where a man stood astride one of those huge,
too-loud motorcycles, the kind my brother favored just after college, before he
made real money and switched to something German. The bike was silent at the
moment, and the man smoked a cigarette, watching me come up the alley. After he
flung down and stamped out the end of his smoke, he switched to stroking his
beatnik-like goatee while he watched.

He wore the complete distressed denim look of the season,
though the stains and tears appeared to come from true distress. The metal and
leather appeared to have been buckled and bolted onto him too many years ago—he
seemed close to fifty—to be the adoption of a fashion trend. He smiled, first
showing several gaps where teeth had gone missing, then closing his lips as a
joyous expression sparked his face.

“My, my.”

“Good evening,”

“It’s getting better.”

As I tugged open the gate to Ian’s house, the man still
watched.

Toby and Ian greeted me as I came into the house. Angelia
was playing music alone in the other room. Cynthia and Jason stood in the
kitchen arguing with a long-haired, ill-dressed man over whether the soup on
the stove was truly vegetarian.

“Susi’s here!” Ian called.

“Did she bring food?” Jason asked. “Cynthia and Arlo are
trying to poison me. I’m effing starving.”

Ian said, “Have some pizza. Quit being such a prima donna
and just pick the sausage off.”

“There’s an odd person in the alley smoking a cigarette and
watching the house,” I said.

Ian bolted out the back door, and Jason abandoned his
argument to harangue me as I unpacked the cornbread and the butternut squash
soup I’d brought, with the idea that we would all snack on it later.

“Why did you walk up the alley?” Jason scolded me while he
served himself dinner.

“Because it was the closest passage from where I parked my
car.”

“You shouldn’t be walking in alleys.”

“Excuse me, this is Wallingford. I have been walking in
Seattle alleys since I was five. It’s not even dark yet.”

Ian came back with the man.

“It’s just Sonny,” Ian said.

Sonny proved to be quite tall, more than half a head taller
than Jason, and he weighed at least seventy-five pounds more. Even ignoring the
outlaw attire, his presence was felt in the room, and he seemed uncomfortable,
moving awkwardly.

Jason said, “This is our new bass player. Sonny Richards,
this is Susi Neville. That’s my cousin Angelia Ferran in the other room playing
fiddle. You know Cynthia? And Arlo is just leaving now. Right, Arlo?”

Sonny shook my hand. “I’m just a session man.”

“No, we don’t work that way here at night,” Jason said. “You
have to be in the band.”

“Far freaking out. How cool is that?” Sonny sounded like a
kid, even with his bass voice. “What’s your band name?”

Ian said, “I vote for Half Way to China.”

“Humble Willy,” Cynthia said. That night, her nails were
fluorescent purple with silver crackles.

“Good lord, Cynthia, how does your mind work?” Ian said.
“The other choice is Jason and the Insurgents.”

“Too derivative,” Zak said as he came in the front door.

“Dare I say it?” Toby asked. “The obvious?”

“What’s that?” Jason seemed almost to be sulking.

“The Jason Taylor Band.”

“That’s what we’ve always been,” Ian said. “Dominique can’t
take your own name away from you.”

Toby whistled. “What if she could? She is so scary.”

“Who is Dominique?” I asked.

“Someone we used to know,” Ian said, “but don’t anymore.”

“Shall we start?” Jason said. “We’ve screwed around enough
for tonight. Arlo, no visitors while we’re working. Please go now.”

~

When we began playing at Ian’s house, Sonny introduced yet
another dimension for how the musicians interacted with Jason. Ian and Toby had
always exchanged code words with Jason, apparently based on their past work
together. Angelia and I had to be coached, so everyone had to stop if either of
us needed instruction or correction.

Although he was positioned half-way across the room,
practically on the porch, in order to get the sound from each instrument
separated properly, Sonny watched Jason constantly. As we began, Jason played a
few chords and then Sonny responded, as if asking a question with the notes he
played. Almost always Jason nodded, and then the rest of us were invited in.
After a couple of nights working together, their guitars asked each other very
few questions.

For all the dithering I do in my solitary hours, there is no
opportunity for that while we work. Jason owns my attention, in the same way
that everyone else focuses on him for direction. The first week at my house,
all our work together had been an exercise in exhilaration, just coming to that
sweet, high place from hours of singing. At Ian’s, we worked hard and Jason
served as our task master. Yet he also listened to what others might be doing.

“Ian, what’s up, buddy?”

“Sorry, Jason. I know I’m slowing it down. But I hear it another
way.”

“Then let’s stop so I can hear what you do.”

“It’s like this. Almost a reggae rhythm.”

“OK, I get what you have. Let’s all try it.”

As hard as we labored, it would be impossible to complain
about the working conditions. I have been in enough rehearsal halls in enough
cities in the western world, under every sort of director, to say that the
conditions and the cooperation under Jason was as good or better than could be
expected anywhere. Ian, Toby, and Sonny seemed attuned to how this work would
proceed. At first I felt unsure, but soon we all responded as if we had been
placed in the hands of a more than usually competent director. Jason helped us
all see the goal, and what each of us was to bring to it, and the raucous,
good-natured friendship in the kitchen disappeared in the living room under a
mantel of professionalism.

Jason is polite and congratulatory to each of us while we’re
working, but he doesn’t single out any one of us for special attention, which
helped remove all the tension left from Saturday night. For the four or five
hours we work each night, the only thing between us now is music. When Ian or
Toby signals that it’s time for a break, Jason takes a second to come back to
himself, but then he becomes his other self again. Every night he wants to keep
working far longer than any of us can endure.

I suppose Ian and Toby experienced this before, but I learn
something every night. We were playing this mountain-music piece, and it seemed
that it helped me to play guitar while singing, perhaps because that’s how I’d
been practicing it at home. Jason shifted the strap so that I held the
instrument higher, which changed my voice.

“You don’t want to hold it like this all the time,” he said.
“Just when we’re trying to get that high-lonesome mountain sound.”

Then he directed me to sing at a lower register for one part
that we had practiced much higher for days. The change clicked for everyone.
Maybe Ian and Toby aren’t immune to how remarkable Jason’s influence can be. At
one point he requested a series of key changes in a song where we had
established parts several nights earlier. In the kitchen over break, Toby
remarked, “I would never have thought of that.”

Tonight, I found his notations for some pieces we are
working on. How do I use English to describe writings in another language? He
does just as he described Copland to Gwyneth, quoting other music, but then he
drives the borrowed theme in another, different direction with key and tempo
changes.

I stole a sheet of his music.

Oh, I’ll bring it back tomorrow night, when we rehearse
again. I just wanted to look at it, so I could understand that this precise,
detailed notation came from the same person who—well, who did all the things we
did together many days earlier. He is no longer coming on to me all the time.
In fact, he scarcely looks at me except when we’re working together, and then
it is no different from how he looks at anyone he is trying to get more from in
rehearsal.

~

“What’s this?” Sonny asked.

Zak was unpacking the bag he brought in. The instrument was
from the collection that hung as decorations in Gwyneth’s living room.

“It’s a Celtic bodhrán. I couldn’t quit thinking about this
song all day. A muffled tom-tom isn’t going to give the effect Jason wants.
Listen.”

Zak stood, holding the drum, to demonstrate what he
intended.

Jason was grinning, which was doubly disturbing because he
hadn’t shaved all week, and his teeth flashed white amid the dark stubble of
beard. “You are brilliant, sir. You incarnate the musician’s equivalent of a
scholar and a gentleman.”

We worked on that one song through the night. Jason had to
stop us several times, making everyone else wait while he rehearsed one
individual to get what he wanted.

“Yes, Angelia, it’s in perfect pitch with the others, but I
want it off by a quarter tone. Will you allow me?”

He took Angelia’s violin, tuned it the way he wanted, and
then played several bars. He handed it back to her, saying, “You get the idea,
but you’ll do it much better. The effect I want is that the violin is the other
voice’s memory, so it’s at slight odds with the principal melody. I’ll tune
with you when I sing that line.”

To Toby, he said, “Be the virtuoso on the high-lonesome
piece. This time, all I want is this Celtic tone in snatches when the main
theme comes around. You’re going to be the principal voice’s memory.”

While Toby was playing, Jason touched my hand.

“Susi, I want three tones right here in this range.” He
pitched his voice with the mandolin. “We don’t want the listener to be able to
tell at first whether it’s passion or grief. Then bend up a half tone so it’s
keening grief. Here’s the rhythm.”

He beat it out on the back of the acoustic guitar he held.

I tried to give him those tones.

“If you sound like a Croatian mourner, all to the good. But
there’s a thin line I want you to tread. Keep the vibrato from sounding like
Bedouin ululations. I don’t want that thought to occur to anyone who hears
this. Then hold this high A until everyone else is done.”

Ian said, “You’ll have to use a tape loop. No human can hold
a note that long.”

“Susi can.”

~

Jason touched my shoulder as the cue, though I knew perfectly
well when I was supposed to come in.

I should stay away from him.

That’s the key to stopping destructive behavior: avoid the
situations that spark it. Yet if I avoid him to save myself, I lose the
opportunity to sing and condemn myself to the purgatory I inhabited before
Jason appeared in Seattle. I could sing in the shower and at Sunday night church,
but now that I’d gone past that protected world, I couldn’t make myself go
back. I could no longer stay home amid the silence every night.

So I go to Ian’s to sing, sneaking under Cynthia’s radar as
it scans for secrets. If I look at his hands, it’s to see whether he is marking
a new rhythm or wants the voices to increase in volume or change in pitch. I’m
not looking at how beautifully tended his hands are, how gracefully his long
fingers direct our attention, or how comfortably he cups his hands around his
instrument, teasing out the sounds that only he can control.

I’m not looking at that.

~

We played it again and again until Jason was happy. At
eleven, Zak called home and left a message on the answer service to say he’d be
late. At midnight Sonny called in to his other job to say he was delayed. At
one-thirty we stopped and Jason played back the last version.

No one could speak after, and not because we were so tired
that it left one’s body vibrating slightly, even after we finished playing.

Toby said, “That’s why Dominique wanted to own you, my
friend. She effing wanted a magician.”

Angelia said, “When you direct, it’s like you’re making love
to each and every one of us at the same time.”

Then the others had to depart. Ian and Cynthia gave Zak a
ride home. For the first time in a week I was alone with Jason again.

“Toby was crying when you played the tape back.”

“That’s just to get Angelia to take him home with her. He’s
passing himself off as a sensitive guy. He thinks she’s his soul-mate, and it
was the hand of God that made me persuade him to come to Seattle.”

“She’s been taking him home every night since the first
time, Jason.”

“Oh. How did I miss that?”

“You seem to be wrapped up in the music.”

“Not totally. I’m also studying on why this sensitive-guy
stuff works for Toby but not for me. Can you explain it?” He kissed my hand,
forcing my fingers to stroke the bristly hairs of his unshaved face. “You can
stay here, if you’re too tired to drive home.”