Always Box Set

by Ward, Susan

  I shrugged. “Hard, but not undoable. We should definitely talk about this. It’s not an offer we shouldn’t try to make work.”

  Her brow crinkled. “How could we make it work?”

  I smiled when I didn’t want to. “I don’t know. We just will.”

  “See, Lena,” Walter said, standing up. “You were wrong about your husband and being difficult over nothing. Now will you tell Yuri you accept his invitation?”

  And before I knew what the fuck had happened, the very thing I didn’t want happened. She’d accepted.

  ~~~

  “I’ll stay if you want me to,” Lena whispered on a husky purr, and I shifted my gaze to find her watching me from the bedroom doorway. “I don’t need the Sciarilo Quartet. There will be other opportunities.”

  I smiled over the top of Reggie’s journal. I’d been reading it since I climbed into bed.

  “Nope, can’t do it, doll. No way to answer that. I don’t want you to go and I can’t tell you to stay.”

  It seemed the right kind of comment to make when walking through a night of landmines. This would put her back on top in her career again, and I was going breakneck speed back to bottom. We were next to broke, and it wasn’t like I had any promising future prospects lined up for me. She deserved this, and it would have been a punk kind of move to take it from her.

  No matter how I turned in my head the grim possibility of her leaving, I couldn’t find it in me to tell her no.

  “I’m your wife. You’re the only one who has a right to tell me anything.”

  I laughed, following her with my gaze as she went through her nightly routine—a brush through her hair, lotion on her arms, and slowly pulling off the nightgown she seldom wore into bed.

  “Only a foolish man would even try to tell you what to do, Lena.”

  She slipped beneath the blankets and curled in to me. “Then tell me to stay, since you’re still a foolish boy.”

  We were being playful, but it was only on the surface. At least for me. From the moment she’d told Yuri yes, I’d felt like I couldn’t breathe.

  I set aside Reggie’s journal and turned in to her. “We’ll make it work, doll. I’ll fly to you. You can fly to me. Nine months. Nothing.”

  She spread out on the bed beneath me. “Or you could come with me.”

  I moved between her thighs, kissing her neck. “Come with you, huh? Oh, definitely.”

  ~~~

  “What’s that you’re reading, Jack?”

  I set the journal on the breakfast table and looked at her. “Just a piece of melody I’m trying to figure out how to turn into a song.”

  She kissed me. “Can you watch Samuel this morning? Yuri is having a meeting with all the members of the quartet. I’ll be back before your studio time, or I can take him to Patty instead.”

  I smiled. “I can watch Sammy. I’m not doing anything more important than that this morning.”

  She dropped a kiss on my mouth and then hurried toward the door. She opened it, turning to lean against it as she smiled back at me. “We were wonderful last night,” she murmured on her husky purr.

  My heated gaze met hers. “We’re always wonderful together, doll.”

  A lush smile raised her lips. “I half thought after that you were going to ask me this morning to turn down Yuri’s invitation to perform.”

  I’d thought about it.

  I won’t lie.

  I probably would have at some point that day, given time.

  “We’ll talk”—I grinned—“and other things when you get back.”

  She blew me a kiss, something she never did, before she shut the door, and I was feeling pretty good as I cleaned up from our breakfast.

  An hour later, Sammy was taking his morning nap and I was at the table, guitar in hand, trying to turn Reggie’s melody into something.

  It just wasn’t happening.

  I started thumbing through pages again, thinking maybe something in his messily penned, indecipherable thoughts might kick off some inspiration.

  Antigovernment rants.

  A few personal insights on Patty I didn’t want to know.

  Thumb.

  Thumb.

  My hand stopped.

  My gaze locked.

  It was just a line.

  Not even a full thought.

  Hell, he hadn’t finished it.

  I can’t take another day being in love with Lena and knowing she…

  I sank down on my chair like someone had punched me in the gut, feeling betrayed by the two people I loved most. As the numbness faded, my thoughts raced in a hundred directions. Knowing Lena what? Loved him?

  It shouldn’t have surprised me. Reggie, in a lot of ways, was like Gustavo Reyes. Cocky and arrogant, full of impossible ideals and angry over everything Interesting. Neither obvious nor simple. The antithesis of me.

  I never went to the studio session. In fact, I never returned to finish the album. It was hard for me to go through the motions of my life with Lena, and I soon convinced myself it was a good thing for us she was leaving.

  Maybe she’d forget Reggie.

  Maybe she’d remember she loved me.

  A little distance all the way around was probably not a bad thing.

  Two weeks later, Reggie left for basic training. I didn’t see him off or say goodbye. In another month Lena was in Europe with Yuri. I just stood there at the international departure gate of the airport and watched her leave when everything inside me screamed not to let her go.

  I felt betrayed by them both.

  I was angry.

  I was hurt.

  I was wrong about many things.

  I did see things too simply.

  And a heart was anything but simple.

  The heart feels what it will, whether you want it to or not. Knowing that Reggie and Lena had fallen in love during those months when I thought my marriage was moving in the right direction again made me miss the larger picture.

  Reggie was right about me.

  I focused on the small things.

  The easy things.

  Never the big picture.

  But I never got to tell him he was right.

  In the spring of 1966 Reggie Dun was killed in action.

  I didn’t finish reading his journal or the ballad he’d started for Lena—well, not when he wanted me to, not after I realized something had happened between them.

  I also didn’t find the answers he intended me to when he gave it to me. I missed the other things he told me on the pages—why he reported to the army when he didn’t believe in a thing he was doing. And it sure as hell wasn’t the reasons he told me back before he’d shipped out—someone had to go, see it since the government lies about everything. Nope, that wasn’t why Reggie went in spite of what he’d said to me. It was more complicated than that, like him: ironically doing the right thing in a quintessential and wrong Reggie way.

  But I didn’t figure that out, not then.

  I stopped reading the second I realized he was in love with Lena, and I was afraid to find anything that confirmed she was in love with him. I didn’t read far enough to find the more important part of what he was telling me.

  He didn’t want to love her, felt badly that he did, because they both loved me.

  Bigger picture.

  And yes, at the time, I missed it.

  Twenty-Seven

  Lena was gone over two years. In the beginning, she flew home to visit me, but after those early visits she didn’t come to New York again. She never explained why, only that she wouldn’t. And after a while, I stopped traveling to see her.

  Reggie was right; everything did change after he left for basic training. It wasn’t long before the country was knee-deep in war in Vietnam as he’d warned we would be, and people were starting to pay attention to the things he’d talked about in the early sixties. Christ, by October ’67, fifty thousand peace activist marched to th
e Pentagon to protest the war, only it was me with them and not Reggie.

  I stayed so active with the protest forces that I rarely thought about the two things I should have been protesting about the most vocally: the state of my marriage, which was in shambles, and my son growing up without me, when I’d vowed never to be the kind of father my father had been.

  When I wasn’t speaking out for peace, I was working. I hit the road like a guy still struggling to pay the rent, though by the end of ’67 money was no longer an issue for Lena and me. She was living in an apartment in London and I was living in an upscale penthouse in Central Park West even though I’d always hated New York City. I’d only purchased it in the hope someday Lena would return to me.

  Columbia Records kept me as a solo artist. I released a second album, a larger success than anything we’d had as Parker and Dun, then a third which rocketed me into stardom.

  The only things I focused on other than my music were the causes that had been Reggie’s first.

  I felt I owed it to Reggie to take a stand finally on something. He’d shipped out to get himself away from Lena—I’d pretty much figured that one out long before Patty had said it to me—only it hadn’t been necessary for Reggie to leave because Lena had shipped herself away from me.

  It was the most brutal irony, only it wasn’t funny, because my best friend was dead and my wife, for all intents and purposes, had left me.

  It was good there was never any time to slow down. I toured nonstop, and endlessly crisscrossing the country made me a visible and vocal part of the peace movement.

  If I’d stopped to breathe, focused on anything beyond my music and antiwar activities, I would have confronted my wife about everything, but I didn’t want to because I didn’t want it to be the end of Lena and me.

  So we lived separately, married but not, me still loving her, and her…?

  It was an answer I didn’t want to know.

  Then the road, as it often does, abruptly changed.

  ~~~

  Touring as a solo act was wearing me down. It was lonely on the road, even always surrounded by people, and I was doing thing, becoming things, I didn’t want to.

  Then out of nowhere, Liam reached out. It started with a phone call in the middle of the night, in some crappy hotel in a city I didn’t even know I was in, but somehow Liam had. He just launched into shooting the shit with me like nothing bad had ever happened between us then asked if I wanted to be a part of Still Light again.

  The offer surprised me. The band didn’t need me. They had their own shit going on, their own recording label, and their own following. But Liam thought it was time we join forces and see what we could create together.

  My first day back in the studio with Still Light was a long one. Once we’d stopped for the day, everyone cut out except Liam and me, and we lay on couches trying to clear the air between us.

  “What do you think, Jack? We good? This going to be a good thing for you?”

  I nodded at Liam. “Feels really solid, man. Like we never broke up. Everything in the pocket. Fuck, I’ve missed playing with you guys.”

  Missed was an understatement. It felt fantastic to be with them again. Liam had given me my first real break as a musician. The years we hadn’t spoken had eaten away at me, and the longer I went down my road alone, the wiser I got about the people I wanted near me.

  Liam smiled. “I missed you, too, Jackie.”

  “Where are you guys hanging out these days? Still Southie?”

  I held out to him the bottle I was drinking from but he waved it off.

  “We’ve been in California since ’66. Got a nice thing going on there. We share a house. We record together. No stress. No worries. Just living.” His head tilted to the side and he gave me a mocking look. “Pretty much everyone doing anything worth hearing in music is in Laurel Canyon now, except you, you little Harvard preppy piece of shit.”

  I laughed, because hell, being insulted by someone who knows you well and loves you anyway was a pretty fine thing.

  His gaze grew serious. “You should come with me to California and check it out. Might be a good thing for you to get out of New York. You look like crap, Jackie boy. A little sun, a little sand might not be a bad thing for you.”

  “It’s just the road, Liam. You know how it is.”

  “Nothing about you is ‘just’ anything. Never was and never will be.”

  He said that the way people often said that to me those days. There were people in the various movements I belonged to who didn’t trust me because of my father. Those on the opposite side of my causes didn’t trust me because of what I said. And my wife—well, I didn’t know if she trusted me or not. I only knew she stayed away, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t fully convince myself it was because I was doing the things she hated and had broken every promise I’d made to her when I picked up the mantel of the peace movement in Reggie’s place.

  Yep, Liam said nothing about you is ‘just’ anything exactly in that distrusting way everyone seemed to view me at some point, but I was pretty sure Liam didn’t mean it the same way.

  “I was sorry to hear about Reggie.”

  I shook my head. “Fucking waste.”

  I took another hit of the bottle, feeling Liam studying me.

  “So what’s the deal with you and Lena?”

  The hairs on my arms stood up.

  Fuck—it felt like he knew something.

  But he couldn’t.

  We hadn’t talked in years and my marriage was one of the few things I didn’t run my mouth on publicly.

  “No deal, man. She’s been nonstop performing with Yuri Aristov and the Sciarilo Quartet. She also has been guest performing with the London Symphony. She’s just doing her own thing. Isn’t that all any of us are doing?”

  He frowned. “You say that like you don’t even know where Lena is. Like you don’t talk anymore.”

  “We talk. Just not often.”

  Liam’s eyes widened. “Do you see your boy?”

  Shit, why was he asking about all this? “Not for a while.”

  He leaned forward in his chair, elbows on knees with his face close to mine. “What the fuck happened between the two of you, Jack?”

  “Life happened.”

  His face tightened with annoyance and he took the bottle from my hand and tossed it into the trash.

  “Bullshit. A woman doesn’t stay away from a man she loves unless he gives her a reason.”

  “A woman stays away from a man she’s married to when she’s in love with someone else.”

  I’d surprised him—I could see it on his face—and fuck, I didn’t want him digging any deeper in this.

  I stood and started to pack up my things.

  “What the fuck are you talking about, Jack?”

  “Nothing, man. Forget I said it.”

  Liam sharply assessed my face then groaned. “Oh fuck, you can’t really think that?”

  I shrugged.

  “You’re out of your fucking mind. No fucking way. Lena loves you.”

  I avoided his heavy stare. “Maybe she did. Once. In the beginning, but not after Reggie. Everything went to shit once they were friends.”

  “Reggie?” He said it as if he couldn’t believe what he heard. “Reggie Dun? Are you telling me Lena had an affair with Reggie? I don’t believe it.”

  “Believe what you want. You weren’t here, Liam. But I was. I saw how they were together and I didn’t do a damn thing to stop it. Then Reggie goes into the army and right after, Lena takes off to Europe. What am I supposed to think?”

  “Well, not that,” Liam answered intently.

  I paused at the studio door. “We both know she only married me because she thought it would help her get her career back. Maybe it did. I don’t know. But she’s back on top again, and I don’t see her here with me, Liam. Do you? You figure out what all that means.”

  He shook his head. �
��You’re fucking crazy.”

  I raked a hand through my hair. “Then your new lead singer is crazy. Maybe you should fire me again.”

  Liam laughed. “Nope. Someone has to stick around here to straighten your ass out.”

  “Straighten me out, huh? Good luck with that.”

  I started heading up the stairs to the street and Liam hurried after me.

  “Do you want to grab some dinner?” he asked.

  He’d pissed me off, but I sure as shit didn’t want to be alone. We took a cab to midtown to eat at some Italian joint Liam liked, and through the entire ride, he sat there silent and staring at me.

  When the cab stopped, he said, “Have you tried to talk to Lena about any of this?”

  I climbed from the car. “Nope, no point.”

  Liam paid the driver and joined me on the pavement. “There’s a lot of point if you still love her.”

  I shoved my hands deep in my pocket. “She knows where I am, Liam. She hasn’t been home in eighteen months. Fuck, can we stop talking about this?”

  He closed his hands on my shoulders and turned me to face Radio City Music Hall.

  The marquee was lit up.

  The Sciarilo String Quartet.

  “She is home. And now you know where Lena is.”

  Twenty-Eight

  I shoved Liam away from me. “Why the fuck can’t you stay out of my life?”

  His eyes burned into me. “Is that what you want, Jack? For me to walk away, like everyone else has that you care about? Sorry to disappoint you. Not doing it. I happen to love you, brother. Your wife loves you, too.”

  Fuck.

  I anxiously raked a hand through my hair. “You don’t know shit about anything.”

  “I know when a guy needs a friend to give him a boot in the ass.”

  I headed toward the restaurant. “Are we having dinner or was that all bullshit, too?”

  I went in without waiting for him to answer. The interior was nosy and crowded, packed with the theater and artsy crowd. Fuck, what the hell was I doing here? I was telling the hostess to find me a table in some dark corner when Liam joined me.

  I went to our booth, ordered a drink, and tossed my jacket onto a nearby chair.