JEZEBEL'S BLUES

by Ruth Wind

  Once again there was a magic flaring, an electric shimmer that moved the air around them and passed between them.

  Celia opened her eyes. His hair fell over his forehead and neck, mussed by her restless fingers, and a high stain of color flushed his cheekbones. His mouth, parted slightly, was soft and somehow vulnerable. His eyes were closed.

  But as she watched, as the pulsing between them ebbed, his lids lifted slowly. A dizziness spun through her, a sense of perfect union that was only rawly expressed through words like passion and hunger and love; a sense of union that made her feel as if the molecular structure of their bodies had come undone, all the atoms spinning together as they made love, only coming back together now, but all mixed, so that parts of her were in Eric and parts of him were in her.

  And as he opened his eyes, she saw his tears, a wash of moisture that gave the extraordinary eyes a starry vividness. She pulled him close, cradling his head against her shoulder, pressing her cheek into his hair. “I love you,” she whispered. “I love you.”

  * * *

  In the deepest heart of the night, Eric awakened. Without words, they’d moved to this attic sanctuary, and there they had stayed without eating or talking—only touching, loving, exploring. He felt like a soldier going off to a war from which he might not return.

  Beside him, nestled into the hollow of his shoulder, Celia slept like a child. A fan of silvery hair sprayed over his arm, and her ripe mouth was parted gently. An angel, he thought. So pretty. He trailed a finger over her jaw, lightly so as not to awaken her. Her slim body was curled next to his, trusting and sweet.

  In all the hours they had spent together, she had not asked him to stay, not by word or deed. She had not wept or begged, whispered pleas or coerced him. She only stared him straight in the eyes and told him she loved him. Simple. Like Celia. She wasn’t afraid to be herself, to tell him her thoughts, to love him—even if he didn’t love her in return.

  Hollowness struck his heart as he began to ease away from the warmth of her form, a millimeter at a time. She barely stirred. In the darkness he found his clothes, and in darkness he dressed, his throat tight.

  When he was ready to go, he paused at the edge of the bed, staring down at the ethereal beauty that was Celia. He thought of braiding her hair and remembered her clenching her fists as the snake crawled over her feet and the way she’d brought him brownies.

  But mostly he thought of her steadiness. Upon learning of her career teaching algebra and calculus, he’d thought it was ill suited. Having known her, he knew it was right. There was order in Celia’s world, a constancy and reliability he’d never known. She was a woman of her word.

  And for that reason, he could not take her with him. Not that she would go, even if he asked. She loved him, and that love had been the most peaceful thing he’d ever known, as soothing as the song of Jezebel on her way to the Gulf. It tempted him to forget his ramblings, tempted him to try to live up to the man she thought she saw. For Celia, he wanted to try.

  And as he stood there, filling his eyes with her slight, sleeping form, he felt tears well up in his throat and in his eyes. He felt them come without surprise. He had never cried, not as long as he could remember—not over anything, but with Celia, everything came apart and as he watched her breath sough in and out, the tears spilled over his cheeks, and he let them flow.

  He loved her. Loved her as he’d never loved anyone or anything in his life. He loved her for all the things she made him feel, loved her for the light sound of her laughter and her bold kisses and her steadiness. But most of all, he loved her for being absolutely, unapologetically herself.

  For one long instant, he realized he was no soldier, only a restless wanderer, that if he wanted to stay, she would welcome him. He nearly knelt, once again, on the soft mattress they had shared and took her into his arms.

  But into her stable world he’d brought only chaos. Into the serenity of her simple life he’d brought dark passion and heavy burdens. He had nothing to bring to their union—not even the songs he might once have offered. If he stayed, he would not be giving, he would be taking.

  Celia deserved more than that. Much, much more. He’d told her he would not leave her sleeping, but this time he didn’t think he could bear to say goodbye to her open, guileless eyes. With an ache in his chest, he turned and left her, slipping down the stairs like a night wind.

  At the car, he looked back to the house, thinking of her father, who had loved Celia only when he had time. Eric would not leave her with that same thought about him.

  Reaching into the back seat, he grabbed his guitar. In his hand, the weight was familiar and beloved, and for a moment, he nearly wept again for a different loss, for that loss of his hands. He swallowed.

  In the gathering light, he climbed the steps to the porch. He left the guitar where she’d find it, leaving one love to the other, hoping Celia would understand.

  * * *

  The sound of the car driving away awakened Celia. It was still dark and it was that darkness that panicked her, that made her clutch the sheet around herself and race down the stairs to the front door. It was the darkness that made her cry out when she saw the tiny red lights already gone down the road. “Eric!”

  The sound of her cry thinned and spread to nothing in the still, morning air. He was gone.

  In grief she bowed her head against the screen door, a wide ache exploding through her chest and belly, a grief so deep, she could hardly bear it, could not weep it away. As she struggled to control it, to find some handle to keep the pain at bay, she cursed herself.

  Because there had been a part of her that had really believed he would stay. His trembling touch, his warring heart, his need of her last night—he loved her.

  She had not let him go without making love to her because she’d hoped one last night together might change his heart, might open his eyes to what could be between them. She had hoped that if she loved him unconditionally enough, his wounds would be lanced and he might begin to believe in himself.

  Raising her head, her dry eyes, she saw the guitar on the porch. For one long moment she stared at it, then sheet and all, she stepped outside and picked it up.

  Inside, she sank to the floor and opened the case. She’d known he had played, that he loved blues guitar, and she had seen the scars that had rendered him unable to make his music. But she hadn’t even seen the instrument upon which he lavished his love. It was made of a hard wood and was finished with a dark blue glaze that made her think of the color of his eyes. It had taken its share of knocks over the years. There were worn places on the neck, places worn away by his thumbs and fingers.

  She didn’t know the exact logic that had led him to leave it for her, but she could guess. He’d lost his hands, his ability to play this beautiful instrument, and with that loss, he’d lost himself.

  It was the most precious thing he owned, this guitar. Celia picked it up and held it against her and it seemed almost an extension of him, as if he’d left her his heart.

  Holding the cold weight against her, Celia cursed her father. For Jacob Moon had written this story. Now it was ending. After finding love he could not accept, the hero would wander far and wide and die a bitter death, while the heroine pined away, alone forever.

  “Oh, Daddy!” Celia cried aloud, her heart shattering. “Couldn’t you have written just one happy ending?”

  Chapter 14

  Eric made it as far as New Orleans before his exhaustion caught up with him. It was an almost instantaneous process. One minute he was driving mindlessly, without thought of his destination; the next he was nearly cross-eyed.

  At the first exit off the highway, he found a motel, one of a friendly, family chain. In the faceless room, he collapsed without even removing his clothes—just fell onto his belly on the bed and passed out.

  When he awakened it was late afternoon of the following day. His hands were stiff with the driving and the lack of movement afterward. They ached. He was dizzy, too,
and he remembered he hadn’t eaten in a long, long time, save for a couple of oranges purchased at a roadside stand.

  He needed food and a shower. He got to his feet and groaned at an ache in his lower back. The room was still and sticky and he flipped on the air conditioner.

  His thoughts were frozen—his bodily needs came first. That was what the road did for him, he thought grimly, turning on the shower, kept him so physically miserable he didn’t have time to think about anything else.

  As he tugged his shirt off, a waft of scent was released from the fabric, a scent of patchouli and roses.

  Celia.

  He was about to throw it into the corner, but at the last minute, lifted it to his nose. He buried his face in the soft flannel, inhaling deeply, feeling the press of her mouth upon his own, the give of her pliant body, the sound of her laughing…

  Instead of throwing the shirt aside, he folded it and wrapped the plastic shower cap around it to preserve the precious scent.

  The shower and a solid meal eased most of his physical discomfort although his back still ached vaguely. Long road trips, because he’d made so many of them, had begun to make his back ache—one of the reasons the Volvo with its heated seats had been so appealing.

  Outside the restaurant where he’d eaten, he paused. It was summer. It was night. It was New Orleans. Somewhere, somebody was playing the blues.

  He found them in a close little bar near the levee—a quartet playing Delta style. Eric knew the guitarist from a long way back when both had been perfecting their licks for just enough money to buy their beer for the night and a little breakfast the next day. On a break, Eric bought him a drink, and they hunched together over the whiskey, laughing about old times.

  “So where you been, man?” Davis asked. “I heard about that accident, but you plain dropped outta sight.”

  Eric lifted a shoulder. “Just been putting things back together.”

  “You written anything new lately?”

  “A little,” Eric replied, thinking of the song for his sister and the harmonica pieces that had been flitting through his mind.

  “Come on up and share ’em,” Davis said.

  For the first time in two years, Eric was tempted. He looked around the dark, softly smoky room, feeling the old longing to share the blues with a room full of people.

  Davis waited, and Eric suddenly felt a swell of rightness—this old friend would know where to fill in with his guitar while Eric sang or played his harp. The music would not be exactly what he thought it was now; the crowd and Davis and even Eric’s mood would influence it. It was time. Giving Davis a nod, Eric said, “Yeah. I’d like that.”

  And so it was that he found himself on stage for the first time since the night Retta died. For a moment, as the band assembled around him, Eric felt a little awkward without the ever-present shield of his guitar. Then he tugged his harmonica from his pocket and settled on a stool, and the stage fright passed.

  They started with one of the pieces Eric had written a long time ago, the same song Willie had sung at the club in Gideon: “Jezebel’s Blues.” Hearing the words now, Eric had to smile at the memory of the homesick boy who’d written them. It was odd to hear someone else play the slow guitar he’d always played, but there was satisfaction in meshing the harmonica with that guitar, in weaving together the old with the new.

  After a time, Davis nodded at him and Eric leaned into the microphone to sing. At the sound of his voice, a whoop sailed out from the floor and he stopped, grinning, then started again and kept going in spite of the whistles and catcalls from the crowd. He fell into the singing, into the songs, old songs and new ones, songs he had written and songs he hadn’t. Behind him and with him, Davis played guitar and sang harmony. Even Eric could hear how good they sounded together, and he wondered how it was they’d never blended their voices before this.

  They played until they were sweaty with the humid air and exertion, sang until Eric was hoarse. And when they would have quit, the crowd whooped and hollered for one more. Just one more.

  Davis nudged him. “Do your new one,” he said. “I’ll follow you.”

  Eric pawed, then settled on the stool and lifted the harmonica to his lips, bending into it. He coaxed a slow, mournful pull of notes, hearing the nights he’d sat on Laura’s porch, wondering if she were alive or dead. It wasn’t what he’d meant to play, but years of living by intuition told him to go with it. He played the notes he’d composed in Gideon, first in Celia’s attic, then on Laura’s porch and finally on the banks of Jezebel that last morning.

  There was loss and grief and despair, the long, long story of his life, the story of things never ending right, but always, always going foul. There was the ache of a motherless child and the pain of never settling. Davis’s guitar picked out a melancholy key and his slide whined over the strings in the old Delta style.

  When Eric was sure the guitar had found the pattern he needed for background, he let the harp take him in another direction. Through the sorrow now wove moonlight, silver and soft—the sound of a fey slender woman, the sound of her laughing into Eric’s melancholy and breaking it up.

  When it was over, Eric leaned into the mike. “That was for Celia,” he said, and climbed down from the stool.

  The crowd let the band break. Someone dropped coins into the jukebox, and Eric blotted his face with a handkerchief. “Thanks, man,” he said to Davis. “It’s been too damned long.”

  Davis chuckled and drank deeply of a glass of water. “You keep up on that harp, you’ll be another Sonny Terry one of these days.”

  Eric made a dismissive grimace. “Listen, I was back home for a while, and there’s a boy named James who's going to be somebody on guitar. Another year, he’ll be ready to try his wings. I’d like to get him out here before the summer’s through to play a night or two and get his feet wet.”

  Davis smiled. “Tell you what—I’ll make you a deal. You write some words to that piece you just played and let me work out something to get it recorded, and I’ll see your boy gets what he needs.”

  “You got it.”

  “I want you on harmonica,” Davis added as Eric headed off stage.

  He lifted a hand. “I’ll be around.”

  * * *

  The satisfaction of his playing and singing, the pleasure of letting the blues flow through him lasted until Eric opened the door of his faceless motel room in the middle of the night.

  He went in and closed the door quietly so as not to awaken the vacationing families all around him.

  It was so quiet. No birds signing, no cats fighting, no river rushing by in a soothing song. Faintly over the hum of the air conditioner came the sounds of trucks on the freeway. A lonely sound. He tugged off his boots and socks and flipped on the television and set it to a cable station playing movies through the night. But it didn’t provide the kind of noise he was looking for and he flipped it off again.

  There was no smell here, either. No scent of pine or frying bacon; no fishy odor hanging like a ghost in reminder of a good meal; no coppery scent of water or rich earth. Only a faint trace of some astringent cleaner and freshly washed linen—pleasant enough, but without character.

  He dug in his backpack for another orange, some Oreos and his old standby, the rubber-banded paperback copy of Jacob Moon’s Song of Mourning. It had helped him pass more than one lonely night.

  After a trip to the soda-pop machine for a can of cola, he sprawled on the bed and began to read. It was a little tougher this time to settle in. There were intrusions now. His life had shifted dramatically since the last time he’d tried his homesick cure. Tonight instead of getting lost in the story, he kept thinking of reading the original manuscript. He remembered the tiny changes that had been made in the publishing process’ shifts that aligned each word with every other word.

  Celia’s face kept appearing as he read over the words: Celia laughing at him as he told his sad story; Celia weeping because she missed her father; Celia tossing her
head with a wicked smile as she pinned him against the mattress with her lithe, lovely body.

  But he’d spent more years than he could count trying to forget things that gave him pain. He concentrated. By the third chapter, he was firmly anchored in the Gideon of his childhood, and he immersed himself in the old magic.

  It was a story about a boy from the wrong side of the tracks who fought like hell to be somebody, only to die a tragic, early death believing the worst everyone had ever said about him. It was a simple and familiar tale, and he read it less for the story than for the mood of home that ran through it like a song. Like the blues.

  But tonight, as he read, Eric felt an embarrassed little shock over his identification with the main character. It seemed uncomfortably melodramatic.

  Celia’s words wafted through his mind: No wonder you like my daddy’s books. They’re written about your life, aren’t they?

  In a way, the book was the story of his life, and particularly since this last trip home, it rang true. But as he read, he grew uncomfortable.

  For every time the young man had a chance, he sabotaged himself. Eric had always known that, known that half the reason the character died tragically was his own fault. This time he felt a distinct annoyance at the hero, particularly when there was a woman in his corner, a woman who honestly loved him, who could have healed him if he’d given her a chance.

  Whenever you get over feeling sorry for yourself, you know where I am.

  With a sigh, he put the book down, pursing his lips as a new angle of the novel settled in, obvious as the nose on his face if he’d just come out of his brooding long enough to see it. Song of Mourning was a morality tale. It had a lesson to teach. Because Moon had been the writer he was, a member of the school of obscure lessons, it was a fable.