Part 9 (1/2)

”No. Some other time.”

I think about it for a split second.

”You're asking me on a date?”

He grins.

The smile comes before I can fight it, and I say, ”Oh, Clive, this is so misguided.”

”I like older women,” he announces proudly.

”But I'm too much older,” I say, not even bothering to do the math. But in no time, I've already played the scene out in my head. We have dinner in a cheap Italian restaurant, we drink too much wine, he takes me back to my trailer, he thinks the trailer is cool, he thinks I'm fantastic, I put on some Joni Mitch.e.l.l, he likes me even more, I don't mind kissing him, I don't mind his hands on my b.r.e.a.s.t.s, I'm not afraid to be naked, I'm telling him what to do, he does it just fine.

And then the morning. Always the morning.

And then I'm pregnant. I'm pregnant! I call Mark and say, Guess who else is having a baby? and he is wild with jealousy, and he agrees to keep paying for my car, and in fact, he wants to talk to me, wants to tell me how stupid Stephanie is, how he wishes that he and I were having a baby together, and he asks me, How did this ever happen? And I tell Clive I'm pregnant, and he gets scared and dumps me, and then I tell Franklin I'm pregnant and I have to drop out of the band, and he falls in love with me because another man has gotten me knocked up, and then he agrees to raise the baby, and he forgets about the bluegra.s.s band and session work and McCoy's and he gets a real job with his MBA and the baby comes.

And then he looks at me as if I'm a stain on the carpet.

Clive says, ”Listen, I'll tell you a secret about me.”

”Don't.”

He says, ”My first lover was my high school English teacher. She was fifteen years older than I was. It didn't last long. Then I dated girls my age. But the pattern is set, you know? It's like playing the ba.s.s. It's the rhythm. The rhythm exists in your head. You hear it and you play it. You don't ask why.”

I say, ”Only children don't ask why.”

He looks wounded when I say this. Good, I think. Good.

”Go home,” I tell him. ”Look in the mirror. Remember who you are. And that relations.h.i.+p was a mistake. The first one often is. The first one is just a matter of exploring your dark side.”

He has lost interest in fighting me. Now he just wants to know what I mean.

”What was your first relations.h.i.+p?”

My first relations.h.i.+p. It ended in marriage.

”It was a mistake,” I tell him. ”I've been trying to escape it ever since.”

Now he is standing on the sidewalk, looking like a little boy, much as he must have looked to his high school English teacher, who saw the bait and took it. She was a vampire. She was a thief. He is not ready to hear that.

I have to leave him with some dignity, so I say, ”Thank you for asking. It is very flattering, but even if you were the right age for me, I'm not dating right now.”

”Well, all right. But why? Why aren't you dating?”

”Because I'm still married,” I tell him.

He seems surprised. ”I thought you were divorced.”

”On paper,” I say.

He seems to hear this. Then he gives me a noncommittal wave and walks off down the street, his electric ba.s.s in a gig bag, b.u.mping against his hip.

And I smile, in spite of everything, because of everything. Because I know now that Franklin saw this coming, and he wanted to head it off at the pa.s.s. Franklin wants me to himself.

It is the good news and the bad news.

WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN, Carolyn Millner's mother stopped teaching me violin. She had to. Carolyn was fully entrenched as a popular girl by then, and she simply couldn't tolerate me in her house. She told her mother this several times before it sunk in. Mrs. Millner loved me and loved teaching me, because she had glimpsed my talent, and true musicians always enjoy setting that thing loose from its cage. But in the end, a mother is always going to choose her daughter.

By then, I knew enough about technique, and I played music by ear, so I took my violin home and started teaching myself the rest. It drove my father crazy, hearing the scratchy scales coming out of my room, enduring my experiments with vibrato, listening to a single composition played a dozen and a half times.

Partly it was because the sounds in my room wounded his ears. But it was also because he was a churchgoing man, and when my music sounded right, he knew, on some level, that I had invited G.o.d into my own little microcosm and that he, my father, was losing his grip on me. I was sixteen and on the verge of losing him altogether. He was, or claimed to be, a devout Christian, and his sole purpose in life by the time I grew b.r.e.a.s.t.s was to keep me away from men. He knew I couldn't actually love Mozart, a man with a ponytail who was long dead, but he heard me loving him, anyway, and it drove him crazy.

This was somewhere in the South in the 1970s. The war was grinding to a halt, Nixon was leaving, nuclear missiles were poised and ready to fly, the civil rights movement was under way and gaining ground. It was all too much for a simple man. My father prided himself on being simple, but a truer description was that he was elemental. He couldn't trust what he didn't understand, and he didn't understand much. There wasn't much left in his control, but he could be d.a.m.n certain that I wasn't having s.e.x.

I wasn't having s.e.x. That fact was not enough for him.

He came to my room one night and said, ”All a poor girl has is her reputation.”

I said, defiantly (and not really understanding my history, which is where defiance comes from), ”We're not poor.”

He said, ”If I see you running around with boys, I will put a stop to it.”

I thought he meant boys. He really meant music.

I started listening to Led Zeppelin and Bruce Springsteen, playing along with their violin parts. I also started wearing short cutoffs in the summer. My hormones were all over the place. So were my b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

I started making out with Johnny Pitt in the backseat of his Mustang. He knew how to kiss, and he found my b.r.e.a.s.t.s and gently pinched my nipples between his thumb and forefinger. It was enough for me. I started wearing colored mascara and Baby Soft perfume.

One night, my father came to my room and said, ”Your mother and I are losing control of you.”

I was sitting on my eggsh.e.l.l-colored carpet, looking at the alb.u.m cover of the Rolling Stones' Goats Head Soup. There was a song on the record called ”Dancing with Mr. D,” and another that everybody called ”Starf.u.c.ker.” The world was opening up before me like a flower.

I said nothing.

He said, ”I am taking your violin away.”

I shrugged. ”Take it,” I said.

He did.

I didn't object. I had lost interest in it. I was more interested in what Keith Richards did with a guitar and what Johnny Pitt did with my b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

After he took my violin, he took my records. I never knew what became of the records. I started listening to the radio.

We lived in this old Victorian mansion on the main street of a small town. The sound traveled quickly through the house and almost as quickly through the town. He took my stereo away. Then I was left with my transistor radio. Which was where I heard all the best music, on AM stations from places as far away as Chicago. I heard Lou Reed and Mountain and Todd Rundgren and MC5 and the entire world of Motown. I heard Al Green and Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye. Marvin Gaye was the best. Marvin Gaye did what Johnny Pitt wasn't brave enough to do. And when I heard my father pacing outside my room, I knew that he was aware of what was happening in there. I wasn't just having s.e.x. I was having s.e.x with a black man.