Nine Volt Heart (24 page)

SUSI

A
FTER SPENDING ALL OF Saturday
putting my household back in order and grading papers, I went to visit my dad
for the evening, then came home and went to bed early. I took a long run on
Sunday morning, putting off the chore of my diary. Most of the entries in the
past week consisted of writing down lyrics to the new songs to ensure that I
remembered them, though I have never failed to learn lyrics after a first
trial. I’m trying to create the same notations that I’d seen Jason do for his
music.

Every few minutes I think I should call my dad to say what I
couldn’t make myself tell him last night: “I’m all mixed up over a man. He
wants to marry me, and it sounds so logical whenever I see the hair on the back
of his wrist. Or if I look at his belt buckle. What do you think?”

Before I can make myself call, I try to think of what Dad
would say, and it stops me before I can dial. Soon, I have to tell Dad that I’m
singing every night, that I plan my whole day around being with these
musicians, that I drive across town like a junkie looking for a fix—and believe
me, I do not choose that conceit without considering everything it implies.

I made more notes about the songs we were working on—the
kind of “artist’s impression of working with greatness” pap that would
embarrass any diva trying to flatter a maestro in order to get hired again.
Things I’d never consider writing at any time in my life. We are talking about
pop music, for heaven’s sake.

To prevent embarrassing myself, I stopped writing and spent
the rest of the afternoon making bread and wishing it would be evening soon, so
I could go sing with Jason, wondering if everyone had played together on
Saturday and didn’t invite me. How perverse is that? I would say it felt like
high school, which is what Jason said when he complained about my
indecisiveness, but I didn’t remember feeling like this in high school. I
remember auditioning for parts that I wanted badly, and holding my breath when
the phone rang. This felt like that, except my stomach was tied in knots,
instead of just my brain racing and rationalizing.

Hence, when a knock sounded at the door, I leapt up, tipping
over my tea. I tried to hear whether a tall person knocked, or was it lower? It
couldn’t be Angelia, for she never knocked and she was too busy these days to
speak to me outside of rehearsal. I mopped up tea with a kitchen towel and then
carried it with me, like a brainless idiot, to answer the door.

That Logan stood on the porch shouldn’t have surprised me.
That it wasn’t Jason distracted me, with the result that I invited Logan
inside.

Which I had promised myself I would never do.

“Hi, Susi. I’ve been calling, but never hear back from you.
So I stopped by on my way out of town.” His skin had that deep hickory color
that people get when living in Texas, but when he took off his sunglasses, the
skin around his eyes was ashen white, almost grey. He seemed ill under the
robust color of his skin. As ever, he dressed at the expensive end, even in
casual travel togs.

“You shouldn’t have.”

“It’s no bother. I wanted to see you.”

“I mean, you shouldn’t have come, Logan. I don’t want to see
you.”

“It smells delicious in here. You must be in one of your high-energy
relaxation moods.”

“In fact, I’m busy getting ready for the coming week. I have
an engagement this evening. What did you want to see me about?”

“Let’s sit down and talk. You look fantastic.”

“I prefer not to sit. You may stay for a moment, if it
pleases you, Logan, but I shall stand.”

“Please don’t be obstreperous, Susi. This is hard enough for
me.”

“I wouldn’t want things to be difficult for you.”

“You didn’t used to be sardonic.”

“It’s funny how people change. What do you want?”

“I want to make amends to you.”

“Oh no, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do.” He held out his hands, helpless, whining with a
gesture.

“I mean that I won’t stand for you coming here and saying
that. There is no possible way you can make amends. If you were working your
program the way you should, you’d know that, too.”

“You can’t preach to me about how to work the program.”

“I can if you choose to come into my home to indulge in some
piety that’s supposed to help you but will do nothing for me.”

“Susi, we have to get past this.”

“I have gotten past everything that it’s humanly possible to
do. It is not possible for me to allow you to work out your issues at my expense.
I have neither patience nor time.”

“You have to accept some responsibility, Susi. We were
married too long for you not to accept your piece in what happened.”

“Is that little speech designed to create a scene you can
hash over in your club meeting tomorrow? I had rather a higher opinion of
Narcotics Anonymous than I do at this moment.”

“I’m not doing NA. I wasn’t comfortable with all those
junkies. I’m much more at ease at AA meetings. I met a really, warm sweet woman
there who has helped me a lot. We have a saying—”

“Yes, I know about your sayings. I have a new acquaintance
who stays alive through NA. He has a saying, too. He says, ‘A fucker is a
fucker. No way around it.’”

“Susi!”

“Listen, you never came to see me once while I was in the
hospital. If you want to make amends, spend as much time volunteering in a burn
ward as I spent there.”

“I was in rehab.”

“You were in rehab less than half the time I lay in that
ward. Go see what the little children go through. Give something of yourself to
someone. Just once in your life.”

“I have been hoping you would forgive me.”

“You also believed in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy far
too long. Just get in your car and drive away, Logan.”

“I came in a cab.”

“You said you were traveling. You always rent a car.

“Except I can’t rent a car without a license.”

“You don’t have a license?”

“There was a little backsliding episode a few months ago
that resulted in a DUI. Because of everything else, I lost my license for
ninety days.”

“Call another cab. There’s the phone.”

“Actually, my plane leaves in two hours. You know how slow
the cab companies can be. I was hoping you’d be kind enough to give me a ride.”

I didn’t murder him, for which I hope to receive full credit
when final judgment is laid down on all our souls.

“Get in the car, Logan. I have just enough time to take you
to the airport and then make a standing date. This does not endear you to me,
so I would appreciate silence while we’re driving.”

“Come on, Susanna. You are being as unreasonable as you ever
were.”

“I’m happy to hear that’s true. Please don’t call me by that
name.”

JASON

A
FTER IAN AND TOBY begged off
working on Sunday afternoon, I put on shorts and a t-shirt, stuffed my pack
with jeans and a real shirt, and ran over to Susi’s house from Wallingford,
which is a clean ten miles. I went around the hills instead of over them, so it
wasn’t a particular feat, just a pleasant sort of trance work.

As I walked up her alley way, still cooling down from the
run, she came out of her house with a man who stuffed his suitcase in the back
seat of her car. Then they both got in and drove off down the alley. A blond
beach-boy son of a bitch with too much of a sun tan, which indicated he wasn’t
from around here, or else spent a lot of time away. He was talking a mile a
minute, as they so tritely describe it, as they drove away.

I sat on Susi’s front steps, checking the time on my cell.
Perhaps I’d gotten it wrong, and we were supposed to meet at the church. Or not
meet at all. I went around to the back, crawled up on her deck where no one can
see, and changed into jeans and a clean shirt. When I sat on the edge of the
deck, Sonny slipped in beside me.

“Figured this was where you were headed. I wasn’t going to
break my ass running after you.”

“Hi, Sonny. What are you doing here?”

“I pulled Sunday watch for you. Damn, this lady has a great
garden. Her early peas are weeks ahead of mine.”

“Do you know who she’s with?”

“Someone she didn’t want to see. She pushed him out fast,
while ragging him to shut up when they drove past me. If you want my guess,
it’s her ex. You could see him stepping into her space like he thought he had a
right, not noticing she didn’t want him close anymore.”

“Rats. I missed the chance to pound him.”

“Want to play music while we wait to see if she’s coming
back? I have a guitar in my car.”

“I have a mouth harp.”

So we played. When we paused, Sonny said, “I heard you were
Jesse Rufus’s kid. I didn’t know he had one. You know, we opened for those
dudes back in the Seventies. Then I played a few weeks for him myself, right
before he croaked himself.”

“What was he like?”

“Self-destructive as hell. Even I had to hold my breath
sometimes.”

“Yes, I guessed that,” I said. “I spent a lot of time
worrying that I might be like him.”

“You have more going on. Your songs are better. Your voice
is stronger. Your guitar work—man, you had to be standing in the front of the
bus when God handed out talent.”

“Thank you for saying so.”

“You look and sound like him. I’m guessing you aren’t too
happy about that situation.”

“He was a drunk. He ruined my mom’s life. He ruined his own
life. He didn’t even come into mine. I can’t forgive him, Sonny.”

“You feel that way about me, too?”

“My business wasn’t mixed up with yours in the past. There
is nothing between us to either forgive or forget.”

“You think my kid should forgive me?”

“I didn’t know you had a kid.”

“Knocked up his old lady when I was nineteen. That means
he’s, what, twenty-five now. Almost as old as you.”

“Do you talk to him about it?”

“Long hours in the past year. It’s unforgivable, the stuff I
did.” Sonny paused. “But he’s talking to me.”

“I didn’t have that privilege. I just talk to my father in
my head. We’ve been conversing since I was thirteen.”

“How’s that conversation progressing?”

“He’s still a bastard and I’m still one ticked off son of a
bastard.”

“If you want to talk with my kid, I can ask him to call
you.”

“No, it wouldn’t be the same. He at least knows you.”

“Maybe I could answer for Jesse.”

“Too weird.”

“Nah. One fucker is the same as another. I can make as good
a guess as any. What do you say to him in your head, Jason?”

“You had everything going for you, man, and you drank it all
away. What’s that about?”

“I bet Jesse would say what I’d have to say: ‘I honestly
don’t know.’”

“That doesn’t help me much, Sonny.”

“Try another question.”

“OK. Here’s what else I say over and over: Your brother Beau
grew up the same as you. He went through the same shit on the road and had a
lot of the same problems. Yet he came to see me. Tried to help. Didn’t get
drunk and kill himself.”

“Maybe Beau hurt, too, but we just weren’t wired the same.”

We sat, keeping quiet, for a while. Sonny poked me with his
elbow. “Ask the question you really have. Let me try what Jesse would say.”

“How could you screw my mother and not accept the
consequences?”

Sonny shook his head. “That’s what my son asked. Here’s what
I told him: ‘Can’t say I thought about you all the time, but I stayed away
because of you. I’m such a complete fucker, I didn’t want you to have any
of it.’”

“But I wanted my father there.”

Sonny laughed, but not because it was funny. “The devil is
smoking my tail all the time. I didn’t want him getting a chance to light on my
kid too.”

We had to stop at that one.

“Frickin’ hell, Sonny. I guess there isn’t much more to
say.”

“Except that answer only makes sense if he knew about you,
Jason.”

I said, “Beau came around. To me, that says Jesse knew.”

“Then, like I told you, a fucker is just a fucker.”

“So, want to play music for a while?”

“It’s what you pay me for.”

~

When the modest afternoon sun disappeared, Sonny gave me a
ride to the church on Capitol Hill—said he could take church just fine, but he
got enough bluegrass in the studio. I arrived just as the service started and
took a place in the back, looking for Susi, even though I remembered from the
first time that she often missed the liturgical part. I did a fair job of
engaging in the music with the rest of the congregation, though my eyes were on
the door and not the altar. When the worshippers left, abandoning me to just
the true musicians, I greeted them as friends, which I wished they were, and I
didn’t make an excuse for Susi’s absence.

“She never misses,” Dan said. “Hope she’s well.”

At four o’clock she’d been plenty healthy. Why not at ten
o’clock? I didn’t ask that question aloud. We played without her, which seemed
to create a preference for lonely cowboy songs and enough high-lonesome hymnifying
to make my nose bleed, even though my voice is peculiarly suited to that music.
I’d spent Saturday and Sunday composing and playing music intended to blast me
out of self-pity mode. However, I’d come there to get high singing with her,
without being the director or the leader—or imperial dictator, as Dominique
calls me—just as her partner. Here I was harmonizing with tenors and baritones.

She didn’t show, and at the end I was trading phone numbers
with everyone, and the preacher Pete was at me about promises and real
intensions that we play together soon, in other venues. I liked the idea of
these guys wanting to stand up in public with me, but I was talking to myself
too loudly about Susi to hear everything we promised each other.

“There’s a little benefit Saturday afternoon,” Pete said.
“It’s just our folkie friends. Why not join us?”

I agreed. There’s nothing else to do the whole day long but
play music.

Then I walked back across the Madison Valley, up Madrona
ridge, and down to her house in Leschi. I should have gone home. I turned a
half dozen times to find the bus line, knowing I should go back to Wallingford
and crawl under my rock. Instead, I sat on her neighbor’s cement wall in the
alley, shivering in my shirt.

She came home just before midnight, riding in a BMW with a
Johnny Depp-pretty guy, but blond. I hate guys like that, because they are so used
to getting by on their faces that you can’t trust a damn thing they say. She
kept him inside forever, and then he kissed her goodbye at her door. His car’s
headlights cast my shadow on the cement wall in the alley. The sight of my
shadow looming eight-foot tall on rotten concrete caused me to see myself as
the stalker I had become.

There was no sign of Sonny anywhere, and it was too late to
catch a bus, so I hiked over to a convenience store on Twenty-Third Avenue, the
kind that makes its gross sales in malt liquor and cigarettes. I called a cab
and waited, talking with the clerk about whether you can legitimately call a woman
faithless if she hasn’t made any promises.

~

“So I’m not deluded, right, Ian? I have a high tolerance for
ambiguity, but this is driving me nuts. She lets me lead when we’re rehearse,
doesn’t she? She never complains.”

“Yeah. She never argues or complains. If you ask me, she’s
not the same species as Dominique. Or the same planet. What’s she like in bed?”

“Geez, Ian. I’m not telling you that. Anyway, she won’t do
anything I want except in rehearsal.”

“You are never anywhere but in rehearsal or in bed, man. So
you’re saying that—”

“I mean in real life. I want to take care of her. I can make
all the things happen for her that she wants. Karl could help me find the money
she needs for her music institute.”

“That idea is too strange—summer camp to teach roots music
to kids. Why can’t kids today learn music in garages like God intended? That’s
where rock-and-roll school is, in the garage. You need more than one hundred
eighty credit hours to graduate.”

“I want her to marry me.”

“You’re still married to someone else. Meanwhile, she sings
like an angel, and she comes every night to sing with you. Why not be satisfied
with what you got?”

“Why did she go off with one guy and then come home with yet
another man, when she could be singing with me?”

“Why don’t you ask her, Jason? I swear this is like high
school. ‘She looked at this guy by the lockers. What do you think it means?’
Call her up and ask. Then maybe we can get some sleep.”

“I can’t ask her who those men are. She’ll think I’m a
stalker.”

“You are an effing stalker. If you can’t sleep, at least
shut up and stay downstairs in your cave. I need more sack time than you allow
anyone.”