“Strip the transmission driving like that,” I say.
She slumps behind the wheel as rivers of sweat run down her neck. I reach out to touch her, but she brushes by, pulling at her tank top and baring her midriff to the night air as she complains about some oppressive heat I don’t feel. Black bruises that remind me of the spots on a dog’s tongue line her stomach. I want to inspect them, but she’s too far ahead.
“Are you finished?” I ask when she stumbles on the porch steps. We do this dance every time she goes on a bender. Each new episode is harder than the last, and looking at her crumpled on the bottom step, I’m losing faith in our ability to change it.
Eventually, she lets me lead her into the living room and cover her with a blanket on the couch. I stand watch for a minute. Each breath comes easy, her chest rising and a tiny ragged snore emitting as she exhales.
“I really believed you this time,” I say, knowing she’ll never hear.
Once I’m convinced she isn’t going to vomit, I go back to bed. We won’t discuss this later. No questions about where she’s been, what she was on or why her stomach was covered with bruises. It’ll remain one more thing unsaid between us. I think about all the things I’ve never bothered trying to articulate. So many of those true moments were put into music. My own way to say the unsayable. I don’t know why lyrical metaphor became a substitute for communication, but I don’t want Caroline to become just another song.
* * *
• • •
The next morning, I sulk while she fries eggs. The sight of her in the kitchen makes a bit of the anger ebb away. The scene is normal enough for us to pretend the last night didn’t happen. Were it not for the lingering smell of vomit on her breath and the pills beginning their slow journey through my blood, we might seem like normal people. I’m just happy to see her alive, and even though I know my care should override my selfishness and force me to explain how hard these binges are becoming, the truth is I benefit from them. If Caroline were healthy, would she be here? Dependence, I’m realizing with advancing age, is more potent to some men than love. Love can leave. Love can tarnish with time or implode for unknown reasons. I’ve known better men than myself whose love ended not by one disastrous event, but a slow bleed. Death by a thousand cuts the lovers inflicted on each other. Maybe that’s what happened with Angela.
Grease pops in the skillet, speckling the backsplash while we talk about Russell Watson.
“Sounds like a creep,” Caroline says. She splashes Tabasco in the skillet and sprinkles cayenne pepper on the bubbling yolk. Caroline likes breakfast so spicy it becomes an act of attrition. “You’ve gotta be flattered though. It’s harder for rich people to get excited. He must really care.”
My storytelling technique isn’t eloquent enough to make her understand without revealing my secrets.
“You had to be there,” I say.
Caroline joins me at the small booth near the kitchenette’s island. It forces our knees together. We could sit in the dining room at the banquet table, but I like the intimacy of this breakfast nook. Caroline shakes even more pepper over her eggs. I’m still wondering where those bruises on her stomach came from and what the rest of her body looks like. Watching her eat, I remind myself that her time alone isn’t my business.
“Will you play it for me?” she asks while breaking a yolk and sopping up the yellow leak with the corner of her toast.
“Okay, but I don’t think it’ll be your style.”
The vinyl is still on the stereo. I lower the volume, stand close by in case she begs me to turn it off. Caroline just goes on eating, says nothing as the first track ends and the second is half finished. Each song is so brief the album might conclude before she has cleared the table. After the second song, she raises her hand.
“I’ve heard enough.”
I kill the volume, wait for her opinion as if I’ve written the music.
“It’s not very good,” she says.
“We established that before I played it.”
There is a slip of paper inside the case with recent tour dates. Most are mountaintop honky-tonks where even the police don’t venture. Tonight, they are playing in Cherry Tree at a bar called Ace’s High. I know the place. The owners change every few years and have struggled to keep a liquor license due to the violence that erupts each night. Recently, a patron was bludgeoned into intensive care with a pool cue.
I don’t want to venture out into public, especially not to some bucket-of-blood, but Angela keeps coming to mind. If I don’t offer something, maybe Russell will reveal me? Maybe I want to be revealed? It would certainly allow the new songs to get some attention. Perhaps even lead to the recognition I’ve never had, but that would mean being in the public eye. People will never accept me. I can live with that, but I do want them to accept the music. What I must decide is whether it’s enough to see it celebrated through some conduit. A part of me feels like Angela’s had her time. Maybe I’m supposed to offer this last bit of protection, but how much do you sacrifice for someone who stopped caring for you a long time ago? There’s also the money. How much would he offer for a single piece of Troubadours memorabilia? I need the money if I’m going to record my own album, and Caroline is broke, too. Maybe I could even convince her to use the money for some kind of treatment. A few more months like this and I’m afraid what will happen to her.
Whenever my conscience is divided, it always helps to have my guitar. Just feeling the wood in my hands calms me, so I go into the studio and play for a few minutes. Not any original work, just a few outlaw love songs from my youth. Songs often act as nostalgia. A lyric can put you in the backseat of the Chevy where you lost your virginity. A chord progression can remind you of your grandfather hoeing the garden or bring a certain girl’s smile back across time. Music taps right into your subconscious even if the song has no thematic resonance to that moment. Just another application of those emotional pressure points I’m always searching for.
Caroline comes in and kneels next to me. She runs her hands over the scarred wood of my guitar, traces the scrapes around the sound hole from a thousand errant strikes of my pick.
“So old,” she says. “Is this your first guitar?”
“I told you, Mr. Freemont’s guitar was my first one.”
“What happened to it?”
The guitar has been missing for years now, but I can’t remember how I finally misplaced it. Now, I’m only thinking of the day I laid hands on it. Those steel strings biting deep into the pads of my fingers, letting me know for the first time that beauty has a cost.
“What was the first thing you learned to play?” she asks.
“Gospel songs.”
Her eyes look up at me, letting me know she doesn’t want me to stop strumming.