| Stay |
| by Chandrah |
| Chapter 4 |
| Part I |
| “You remember Betsy, Jack.” I’m tryin’ to act as casual as I can, while on the inside I’m nervous as hell. An hour ago Betts and I were together upstairs. Half an hour ago we were in the shower. A minute ago, thirty seconds ago, Betts and I were kissin’ in the kitchen, holding onto each other as if we’d never let go. I’m still weak from it when I opened the door as the car pulled up. Jackson, my bass player, my friend, my substitute father, looks at me as if I’ve grown two heads for a second, then puts out his hand for Betts while he drops his bags at the door.
“Sure, sure. How are you?” he asks. His hands, big, heavy, calloused, cover hers, and even though I know that he’s givin’ her every ounce of attention he should, there’s a bit of him that’s wonderin’ what the hell Betts is doin’ here. It’s on his face, some alteration of expression maybe only I’m aware of, but it’s very real to me. I’m not so sure that this wasn’t a mistake. I’m not so sure about anything. “I promise not to intrude,” Betts is assuring him. “No intrusion at all,” Jackson replies. “Betsy’s been finishing up that article about us, and she came down here to get the final bits and pieces put together.” “I thought that was long done and gone,” Jackson says, and he says it to me, not to her. “Almost,” Betts replies for me. “And I’d like to have you read it before we put it to print. Make sure you’re happy with it.” “And if I’m not?” he asks with a smile that says he’ll probably be nothin’ but happy. “Then we’ll see what we can do to make you happy. Until then, I’m a just fly on the wall. Feel free to ignore me.” She smiles at him, then at me, and excuses herself. “I’m going back to the cabin.” “See ya tonight,” I say, and watch her go, watch her leave this house, that she hasn’t left for ten days. Watch her leave in the clothes we finally pulled from the dryer one huge wrinkled mess that had to be washed and dried all over again. Betts took care of it and now we’re both wearing what we wore before… before. “So what’s goin’ on?” Jack asks me when the door closes behind Betts. “Not much,” I lie. The first of many lies, I’m positive of it. “You got a woman up here and you’re telling me that ‘not much’ is goin’ on?” “Oh, man, get serious.” Fuck. “I’m dead serious, Dave. What’s she doing here?” “Finishing the article for Calliope.” At least I can say that with true conviction. “How long’s she been here?” “A while.” “Oh, man…” “Hey, it’s part of the deal,” I tell him, making shit up on the spot. The part of the deal where Betts was supposed to come and spend some time with me, that part was supposed to be long over. Jack knows it, I know it, Betts knows it, and the whole wide world knows it. “You want a drink?” “Probably a few, yeah.” Jackson. Damn him. Should have know, I really should have. He’s not gonna give up on this until he gets what he wants outta me, either. He’s the old man of the group, has ten years on me, and likes to keep things even and simple. Bass player. He is what he plays: solid and steady. Reasonable man, intelligent man. Smarter than me. I love him like family. I can hate him like family, too. I open some beers for us, and have a seat on the sofa. The whole day is gonna be wrapped up in ‘hello, how the hell are you’ conversations. I debate with myself on whether to just tell Jackson up front what’s goin’ on here, or to just let it play out without saying anything. “No one’s heard from you for a while,” Jack starts. “I’ve been writing.” True. Every night. Every day. “I’ve got lots of raw material for y’all to look at.” “Lay down tracks?” “No, nothin’ like that. You got anything?” “Waiting on being here, see what happens,” he says. He takes a long pull on his beer and I take one on mine. “Is this woman going to be here for all the sessions?” “Nah, just for a few days, to get a feel for things.” “Ummhmm.” He arches an eyebrow at me and smiles. Well, crap. “She won’t be in the way, I swear. First time she’s a bother, she goes.” “There isn’t a woman walkin’ this earth that’s a bother to you, Dave. Come on, cut the crap. What’s up with her?” “Nothin’.” I hear it in my own voice. Nothing just meant everything. “Whoa.” I look at Jack, he looks at me, and then we look away from each other. I suppose if we had already had more than this one beer we’ve only just started on, or better yet, were a little stoned, in that friendly sort of way you get before you’re too mellow to talk, we’d have more to say. “So, when are the rest of them due in?” I ask, and drain my bottle in a gulp. Best to keep to other topics, only, I know this ain’t gonna last. Jack starts rambling on about flight schedules and cars and things, and my mind goes away, a mile down the dirt road that runs past this house, to the cabin, and Betts. This was a mistake making her stay here now. Betts has to leave. **~~***~~****~~***~~** This has been one of the most uncomfortable nights of my life, and I don’t have too many of them. Oh, I get stage fright on a right regular basis; always have, always will, particularly those times when I’m up there ‘alone’, without my regular guys with me. Did a bit of a solo thing there, a few years ago, and I liked it, but it was damned strange and nerve wracking. That has nothin’ on this. They’re all lookin’ at me. Not all the time, not starin’, but more or less watching me. Betts has been here since about supper, about ten or so, I guess, and she ate with us at the big table in the dining room we’ve never used since she came up here. She seated herself away from me. Not all the way away, just far enough to bring it to my attention. I guess that was okay ‘cause it really didn’t attract any more attention to her bein’ here than her bein’ here already has. Everyone’s bein’ nice and all; I wouldn’t expect anything different from these guys. And they all know her after a fashion. She interviewed them before she came down to finish interviewing me. Still, there’s a boat load of tension, and nothin’ I’m saying or doing seems to alleviate it. “How long does it take you to complete a song?” I hear Betts ask Lloyd. I don’t hear his response, ‘cause Bryce is babbling something to me and Tyler’s babbling something to him. Jack, he’s watchin’. It’s like they’re taking turns. If one of ‘em goes quiet, they I know they’re the one watchin’. “Are y’all going to be working tonight?” Betts asks no one in particular. The guys laugh. “’Y’all’? Damn, how long have you been living down here, lady? ‘Y’all,” Lloyd cackles with laughter. Even I smile. I don’t know when she got that tinge of an inflection in her voice that’s there now, or when she started to say ‘y’all’. “Too damn long, apparently,” she says, laughing with him and the rest of us. “Nah, we’re not gonna do any serious work tonight,” Tyler tells her. “Never on the first night.” “Then I think I’ll take my leave, gentlemen,” she says. She stands, we stand. Years of habit. When a lady stands, you stand. “Thank you for dinner, and the good company.” “’Night.” The word comes in a chorus, in a variety of tones and expression. I move to follow her to the door and she makes a small shake of her head. I turn back to the table, to the familiar faces in familiar places. A funny thought goes through my head about how people get into habits about every damn thing. Ty, Jack, Bryce and Lloyd are all sitting ‘round the table in chairs that have become their own. They sit in the same seats every time we’re here. Betts’ empty seat looks weird, the plate with a few uneaten bits of food, a chair that’s never used. I don’t rightly understand how she knew not to sit in any other seat but the one she did. I wonder if she had, would the ‘owner’ of that seat relinquished without a word. Probably, but the feel of the table would have been wrong. The table doesn’t feel all that right anyway. “I wasn’t expecting company,” Lloyd says, getting down to business. Jackson shifts in his seat and I know that it’s now or never. I either put it all out on the table, or I start weaving a tapestry of lies so thick none of ‘em can get out from under it. I don’t know that I’m that good a liar. “She won’t be here very long,” I begin. That’s the truth. “I thought we were done with all that interviewing,” Tyler offers. “She just wants to see us do what we do. Lend a little authenticity to the article. Make it more about us, than me.” I reach back to a stack of pages resting on a sideboard and put them down on the table. “This is what she’s done so far, what she’s ready with. I’ve already read it, but have a look. Anything you don’t agree with, she’ll change.” They pick up the pages, reading things out of order, passing them back and forth. I drink. The wine seems particularly good this evening. I’m sorry that Betts is gone, and it’s not the two of us sharing it. By the fire. I don’t think I’ll be spending any quality time there in the living room with the guys. No. “Dave?” “Hunh?” I’m not here. I’m not in this place; I’m not in this room. I turn to look at Jackson. “Pass the bottle, and get it together, man,” he says, and there’s a little frown that comes with that, but a little smile, too. “Sorry.” I pick it up and see that it’s empty. “I’ll get more.” “Never mind, I don’t need it.” He yawns, setting off a series of yawns from everyone around the table. “Maybe I do.” The words slip out, and I leave for the kitchen before anyone can comment on anything. It doesn’t stop Jackson from picking up his plate and following me. ”Would it be a good idea for us to leave and come back in a day or two?” he asks me. “No, it would not,” I say. “Because we could, and then you can… you can whatever it is you…” “There’s no need for that.” I pop the cork on a fresh bottle and pour some red into my glass. Anything to busy myself and not have to look at Jack and see him watching me and knowin’. I lean back on a counter and take a deep drink. I look at the floor, at my feet. “Are you sure?” My eyes finally have no choice, and look down into Jack’s. What I imagined I might see there isn’t there at all. Accusation, recrimination. No, nothin’ like that at all. Concern. Curiosity. It’s then that my slow, lazy head hears the question and it’s such a multi-layered thing I don’t have an easy answer to it. I don’t rightly know what I’m sure about and what I’m not sure about. I take another drink, close my eyes, and see Betts on the lids, see her sweet face, her smile, that sarcastic turn of the mouth she gets sometimes, and when I open my eyes, Jack is smiling at me like I’m the fool I am. “I’m takin’ a walk,” I say. “I’ll leave the door open.” I pass Jack, leaving wine and dishes and what all for whoever feels like clearing it all up, which means nobody, and he touches my arm. For one long second we look at each other and I really look at him the way I would on any other day and had nothin’ to hide. He knows. He won’t say anything, he would never say anything unless I opened the conversation to it, and I love him for that, but he… he knows because he knows me. Maybe better than anyone. I shake my head, he shakes his, and I leave. I walk. Usually, I take the Jeep over to the cabin, but I need to walk tonight. I need the time to think, even though I don’t really want to think. I need to walk off the doubt, and the sadness, because the sadness is comin’ at me full force. The goodbye is coming. Not tonight, I don’t want Betts to leave tonight, or tomorrow, but not much after that. No, not that much after. I don’t know what I’m gonna do after Betts goes. I don’t know when I’ll see her again. How. I don’t know how I can. If I’m so freakin’ obvious now, I’ll be a hundred times more if some great expanse of time goes between now and whenever ‘then’ comes. The night is quiet, like most nights are down here. It’s still cool come the evening, but I’m not feelin’ that coolness too much. I’m warm from walkin’, from walkin’ at a pace that I don’t even realize I’m walkin’ at. I just have to get to her. I have to be with her tonight, ‘cause there aren’t gonna be too many more nights to be with her. There’s just gonna be the words and the music and what’s left of my life before I met her. Lord, help me. That’s about as close to prayin’ I’ve been in a long, long time. **~~***~~****~~***~~** **~~***~~****~~***~~** I have to leave here. I made up my mind on the short mile between the house and the cabin. Admitting it was easier than I thought, but it’s still hard. It will be hard to leave the lazy pace of the days and nights, the incumbent warmth that won’t be up in northern latitudes for some months, and the quiet. It will be hardest to leave David. These men, these men he works with, they don’t want me here, and I don’t blame them. Oh, they’ve been polite, beyond polite, they’ve been welcoming, but the underlying tension is there, and whether they feel it or not, I do. Maybe it isn’t even coming from them, but from me; the source means nothing. David and I can’t be easy and familiar with each other under scrutiny. I don’t know how it all goes between these men, where the relationship boundaries are that have been forged for more than a decade. I can dance on the fringe of it, but I can’t cross over and I certainly don’t expect to. The only boundaries that have been breached have been those between David and I, and those are the boundaries that these men have nothing to do with, and no say in as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know if David sees it like that. The cabin seems to have grown ten fold in a day. I start to gather my things, things that have accumulated and found homes. There are bits and pieces of me everywhere, but I need to bring them together now, let them find nests in my true home. Pens, pencils, paper, and notebooks. Discs, pressed leaves, flower buds, a posy of field flowers that have been drying upside down above the sink. A bottle of perfume that has found its way to a table in the dining area. A necklace abandon on a chair. My lips tremble and I bite them to make them stop. This is his, this chain of hand turned beads. A memento of Africa he wore every day and told me a story about. Some sweet story of him, a boy, and her, a girl, and how she had strung the beads and… and I can’t think about anything like that now. I’ll have to return it to him, because it’s his and I can’t remember how it came to be here, how it came to be off his neck until I recall one afternoon here on the sofa, naked, making love, and the beads knocking gently against my nose making me laugh. He’d taken it off, and now, here it is, just another reminder of what I have to let go of. David lets himself in without a knock on the door, without any preemptory warning, and the impact of seeing him, tall, imposing, framed by the rough hewn door jam, disheveled, and a bit winded, just about knocks my knees out from under me. I say nothing; I hold the beads out to him as if I have been waiting here the entire time to do that. His eyes take me in, his eyes dart all over the room in a quick sweep and see what I’ve been doing in the few short minutes I’ve been back in the cabin, and then he slams the door shut and strides across the carpet to me. “No.” His voice is rough, his arms hard around me. “Not yet. Not tonight.” “I can’t stay here.” My voice is as small as his is gruff. “I know. This was a stupid mistake, you staying here like this with them. My fault. My entire fault. But not tonight. Not like this. Please, Betts not like this.” “Another day just makes it another day harder,” my mouth says. My heart is telling a different story. My heart is telling me to stay as long as I can, to savor every minute, to plan for an uncertain future. My heart is breaking. David digs his fingers into my back, presses himself into me so that I feel his heart that beats so steady, steady against mine. I feel lifted, literally, figuratively. My feet find a step up on the tops of his boots, my arms clutch, and I cling to the moment like I cling to him. “Tomorrow is soon enough,” he growls. “Not tonight.” **~~***~~****~~***~~** “I’ll come to you,” he tells me, soft words in the dark. Lies. I know he doesn’t mean them to be, but they are. It doesn’t matter. My head is on his chest; his fingers make slow patterns on my arm as he holds me. We’ve spent more than a few nights like this, and mornings and afternoons, too. Precious time. So I don’t care that he’s talking nonsense. I don’t care because I know that he doesn’t intend it to be nonsense. “All right,” I agree. “Not for a while…” “You have things to do and so do I.” We do. We have so much to do outside of this time spent together that if I even try to imagine the delicate intricacies of schedules and timing I see it as an impossible tangle of missed opportunities to all the ‘have to’ in our respective lives. He, he will stay here with his band and create his next album and I, I will complete this article, this homily to all things David Phillips and Unit and move on to the next one. Hopefully the both of us will be successful in our endeavors, that they catapult us to new levels of achievement in our lives. That they satisfy and fulfill us so that… so that this won’t hurt the way I know it’s going to hurt, or that at the very least it will dull the ache that’s already beginning to grow in my chest. I love him and I have to leave and life is going to be less without him being there on a day-to-day basis and maybe if I close my eyes tight and wish it to be so, it won’t have to be like it’s going to be. So I close my eyes and raise my hand from the silky hairs on his chest to the thick vein on his neck that pulses with all that life and living inside of him I covet and admire. I want his lips, to kiss him and take in his very breath so that when I’m gone and he’s here, or wherever he may be, I can remember what it was like to taste me on him and him on me. Instead, I find those beads, a child’s love token to another. Smooth and rough at the same time, I fondle them at his neck until he lifts my fingers to his lips and kisses them. “She died,” he begins, and his words flow out of him like honey from a jar, slow, his usual pace, but with a hint of many accents, of British and Afrikaans, and the gentle drawl of the American south all mingled together. “My parents told me that it was an accident, but it wasn’t. I heard them talkin’ later that day to each other, making plans to leave, to take the family away before things got any worse. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I did later. She was black. I was white. That was enough.” He sighs, a great, heaving sigh. “She was a little girl, and they slaughtered her as sure as they slaughtered so many people there. Like they slaughtered my father and brother before we could leave. Chaos. It was all chaos and they would have done us all in. It didn’t matter what we believed, it only mattered what other people thought.” “I’m so sorry.” Lame words, but I don’t know what else to say; I’m perfectly horrified by this unexpected outpouring. “She was my first love. Lindi. I knew her all my life, and she was only ten years old…she was just a little girl.” He reaches up, behind his neck and loosens the beads I had put there on him not an hour ago. They slither down his chest like a living thing, making a soft clicking noise as they all tap together to be caught in his palm. Red, yellow, blue, green; painted wood and rock hard bits of shell and etched stone. Something from the earth. But in the dark of the room, in the shadows of the bed, the beads all look grey and black and white. I have to see the colors in my mind’s eye, but my mind’s eye is very clear tonight. “Nothing is safe, and nothing, not a damn thing, is permanent. It was the hardest lesson of my life to learn, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. I think about Lindi all the time; all the time. There isn’t a day goes by and she’s there in my head as real as she was when she made this for me.” Before I can stop him he’s got these beads wrapped around my neck, tying the cord knot tight, and then tenderly touching them, patting them against my skin. “I go back there all the time, at least once a year, sometimes more. I think, sometimes, I’m lookin’ for her, even though I know she’s not there, but I go anyway, to really remind myself that it’s all, life, it’s all so fragile and… and precious… and important. It’s so important to make the best of it, to make something of it.” David rests his forehead against mine, a stance that has become welcome and familiar. I try to reach for him, to touch his face, and he stops me, holds my hand in his as he whispers, “No one knows this story but my mother, and we never speak of it. I’ll never speak of it again, either, and I trust you to keep it to yourself, Betts. I trust you like no one else. That’s why I want you to keep these for me, because you, you’re the only one I ever felt I could tell this to.” He kisses me and I feel the wetness on his face I can’t see. “Lindi was my first love; you’re my last. I will come for you, Betts. I promise you that I’ll come and we’ll be together and this will… it will work out. I will.” Liar. Sweet, sweet liar. I don’t care; I want his lies, because to him, they’re the gospel truth, and if he believes, sweet Jesus, let me believe, too. **~~***~~****~~***~~** **~~***~~****~~***~~** © 2006 Chandrah, Inc. © 2006 (*> Baby Bird Productions |