by Ward, Susan
I sidestepped the obvious things she was asking and joked, “Really? What gave it away that I’m a novice in romancing a woman? That we were served our dinner in a paper bag or that we had to find a table not covered in bird shit?”
She laughed in half-choking exasperation. “That this is the kind of meal that you think should precede makeup sex.”
That and the way she was studying me caused instant liftoff in my shorts. I took her hand and kissed her fingertips. “The right woman, Linda, makes everywhere a man is five-star.”
She pulled back her hand, scrunched up her bag, and tossed it like a basketball into the trash.
The way she did it made an image of Lena flash in my head. Her dropping the empty bag from the churros into the trash can before saying, “There. We’ve had dinner. Now take me back to the hotel, Jackson. I want to go to bed with you.”
I stood up. “Are you ready to get out of here?”
Linda shrugged. “Sure. I don’t think they have a dessert menu.”
We were both silent as we walked hand in hand back to the car. Linda was so beautiful. It was enough for me to be with and see her.
I drove her back to her dorm.
In the car, I kissed her once.
I walked her to her door and said, “I’ll call you in the morning, sweetheart. But I didn’t come here for a night of hot sex. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love it. But I came here because I love you, so figure out what you want and don’t answer the phone tomorrow unless you want to love me, too.”
I walked away before she could sputter out a single word, leaving her staring after me puzzled and I’m pretty sure mad. Scratch that, Linda was definitely mad. But I didn’t want to restart us with her thinking I was just here for sex, and I didn’t want her thinking all I wanted was an affair and not a relationship.
I meant the part about forever when I said it.
It wasn’t a line.
It was the truth.
I was a one-woman kind of man.
I was ready to have a woman in my life again.
And I wanted it to be Linda.
I was scared shitless the next morning when I called her, but she answered the phone and, before I could say a word, she blurted out, “Jack, I love you.”
And I’ve been in love and loved by that woman, no matter our starts and stops—and fuck, we’ve had our share of those—for thirty-six years.
Forty-Three
Some people believe a relationship is defined by how it starts. Others believe it’s defined by how you love while in it. And I believe it’s defined by how it ends.
How two people end determines whether it’s a stop or forever. A better measure, in my opinion, of how two people have loved.
But then again, maybe I have to believe that.
Linda and I have ended four times.
Our dinner date at the beach kicked off our second affair. It lasted nearly a year in difficult circumstances for the both of us. I was back on tour for the first time in eight years and Linda was finishing her degree at USC.
The first six months of 1981, I crisscrossed the country, and Linda crisscrossed with me when she could. Our relationship existed in an endless series of hotel rooms, and when I was off the road in Santa Barbara my life centered around Chrissie.
Yep, I was doing it again. Living a double life. Only this time it wasn’t Good Time Jack versus married Jack. It was Jack in love with Linda versus Jack working to mend his relationship with his daughter as quickly as he could so he could get married again.
I never told Linda the full details of how fucked up I’d let things get between me and Chrissie. Oh, she knew the part about Walter, but not the part about what a bad father I’d been since Lena’s death, causing my daughter to shut down completely with me.
Lena had been right. Chrissie was a fearful child, and little girls just needed to feel safe. I’d done a piss-poor job of that, so that’s what I focused on, being sober, steady, loving, and attentive Dad.
I should have shared with Linda the full story of what was going on in my life with my daughter, but I didn’t. I was worried that how fucked up things were would scare Linda off me. Worse, I didn’t want to explain to her why I was keeping the two most important relationships in my life separate—Linda and my daughter—because I wasn’t ready to toss that much truth on the table with Linda.
I was troubled I might hurt Linda if I explained why I kept her separate from the main part of my life and that she’d take it as me putting her second to my daughter. How she reacted any time I talked about Chrissie made me pretty sure she wouldn’t understand, and I didn’t want to risk reopening that hole in her heart left by Brian Cray.
Don’t get me wrong. Linda was a loving and supportive partner whenever I needed to talk about my daughter—and definitely a wealth of practical insights on little girls—but I was testing the waters at this time with Linda, too, trying to get a read on how she’d feel about marrying me after graduation and taking on the whole enchilada of my life which included what I could no longer deny was a complicated and difficult little girl.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that I’d been moving our roads in different directions without knowing it until it hit me in the face.
I was head over heels, madly in love with Linda, and the girl was independent and wouldn’t take any kind of help from me. So behind her back, I quietly maneuvered making her life easier, in a way I’d hoped maneuvered us into a better place to be together, because by the end of the US leg of the tour I was ready to be done with our sometimes lovers status.
I helped Linda’s mother, Doris, get a new job with my record label. The woman was too old to wait tables—or so Linda fretted incessantly when she talked about her mother’s health and slim finances.
It was an important part of who Linda was—taking care of the people she loved—so for her I did things that were easy for me and difficult for her. I found Doris a better job, off her feet with health benefits and more money.
It also gave me the opportunity whenever I was at the label to get to know Doris better without pissing Linda off since Linda, for her own reasons, insisted we keep our affair on the down-low.
When Doris let me know that Linda had been sending out resumes after graduation without so much as a nibble, I helped Linda without ever telling her to move to the top of the stack with my good friend Sandy Harris, who was a music promoter. It would also make sure she’d get a job in LA, not too far from home in Santa Barbara if she said yes and married me.
Chrissie was out of school for the summer and I let Walter take her until September without an argument, partly hoping to keep the careful balance of peace I was struggling to maintain with Lena’s father and partly because what man wants his daughter along on his honeymoon?
It was far from the perfect honeymoon—two months touring with Jack across Asia—but hell, sometimes a man had to work the best he could within his limitations, and I was just trying to make fit a whole bunch of pieces that seemed determined not to come together on their own.
I’d convinced myself that if I waited for perfect timing I’d be waiting forever for Linda. I was ready to ask her to marry me before we headed out together as we planned for the final two-month leg of the tour.
I went so far as to arrange a romantic, if not opulent, wedding for us in the Nevada half of Lake Tahoe so she’d be my wife before I rejoined the tour.
A perfect plan.
Or so I thought before everything went wrong in a three-day span of being with Linda at the West Hollywood Hyatt during my LA concert at the Forum.
Two major events happened in three short days.
One that would eventually prove insignificant to us.
One that would be forever life altering.
Only, at the time, I didn’t know which was which, and wouldn’t for nearly three years.
Things started out well when Linda arrived at my hotel room. We shared a loving reconnect
via incredibly hot sex after our six weeks apart. But somehow we ended up in a fight.
It had been all my fault. After making love to Linda, I’d argued about Chrissie with Walter by phone, and he always left me feeling anxious about everything. I was a guy just trying to figure out how to get the two girls I loved—Linda and Chrissie—together in my life in a better way than we currently existed.
I’d said things to Linda that I shouldn’t have, and she had stayed behind in the room instead of joining me at my concert as I wanted her to.
I’d gone to the after-concert party, though I shouldn’t have, but I needed some time to regroup. I’d arrived in LA with high expectations and in less than twelve hours things were spiraling out of control around me as they always seemed to do those days.
I was sitting alone at a patio late at night somewhere when Liam said, “What’s that you’re staring at, Jackie?”
I turned the ring box toward Liam.
“That’s not what I think it is?” he asked, making me tense with how he said it. Both of us knew more about Linda’s reputation than even she did, though I wasn’t sure what Liam thought about it.
I shrugged. “I picked it up today at the jeweler’s, but I didn’t want to leave it in the room and have Linda find it. I was thinking I might ask her to marry me this hop.”
Liam laughed. “You don’t think about something like that. You just do it.”
I smiled, snapped closed the case, and then sighed. “I’m not sure I should.”
He studied me for a moment then frowned. “Is it because of her or something else I don’t about?”
My temper flared. “Fuck you, Liam, for asking me that. I don’t give a shit about Linda’s past. She hasn’t done anything that the two of us aren’t guilty of doing ourselves. It’s just she’s a woman so people judge her differently. Same sort of shit people put Lena through. Lena’s past didn’t matter to me, and Linda’s sure as hell doesn’t. Don’t you ever say an unkind word about her to me.”
“I wasn’t,” he said in that unflappable Liam way, “so don’t get pissed off at me, Jackie boy. It’s not necessary. If you’re happy, that’s all that matters to me. You know that. And you don’t have to sell me on Linda Cray. I think she’s just the kind of woman you need. Strong enough to keep your pitiful ass in line.” He tilted his head to the side and gave me a look. “And I definitely don’t need another lecture on the inequality of the sexes if that’s the cause you’re championing today.”
I ignored the slight about my endless activism and said, “Women don’t need me fighting their fight. They already rule the world. And once they figure that out, you’re going to be pretty much shit out of luck, Liam.”
He laughed.
“Then why are you sitting here, Jack, staring at a ring instead of back in the room asking Linda to marry you?”
I shook my head. “Things are heating up with Walter again. I should never have let him have Chrissie for the summer. I can feel it. He’s going to follow through on his threats to take me to court and fight for custody of Chrissie. I don’t know if it’s fair to put Linda through that.”
“If she loves you, there is no way to prevent her going through that with you, if it happens, so you might as well ask her to marry you anyway.”
I chewed on that for a while.
Liam was right.
It would only not affect Linda if I ended it with her, and that was the last thing I was prepared to do.
“Get the fuck out of here, Jackie, before you piss off your woman again. It’s nearly 3:00 a.m. You’ll be lucky if Linda doesn’t throw something at you when you step through the door. What the fuck are you doing here at this sorry-ass party?”
I called Linda from the car on the way back to the hotel. She didn’t answer. Bad sign. Second time I’d tried to reach her since I’d left.
As I entered our suite, I was prepared for an empty room or a fight, and instead I found her sitting on the floor, one of her delightful picnics spread out around her.
I hung back at the door and just stared at her.
There were times this woman knocked me off my feet, but always in a good way, and somehow always knowing when I needed it the most. This was one of those times.
She looked so loving and sexy, those gorgeous brown eyes making it almost impossible for me to speak.
“Hello, beautiful,” I said, finally managing to push something through the lump in my throat.
She smiled. “I thought an apology picnic was in order. I know you’re probably tired from being on stage and small talk, and full of crappy, catered, fancy-schmancy food, but some apologies can’t wait.”
With that she righted my world without effort.
“I’m the one who should apologize, Linda.”
She made a silly face. “Then apologize already.”
I knew there were people in my life who didn’t get why I was with Linda, but only a stupid man wouldn’t hold on to her with everything he was worth.
I’d been the one who was wrong.
She apologized.
It was like that between us from day one.
It didn’t matter which one was wrong so long as one of us apologized. Linda loved me and understood the important things at a very young age about how to make a relationship work.
I was in love for the second time in my life.
With the kind of woman few men were lucky enough to find, and, Jesus Christ, I’d somehow found two miraculous girls in a single lifetime.
But I was still me.
I didn’t pop the question that night. I should have. Instead, I let myself get swept away in a night of glorious makeup sex.
A critical error I’ve regretted a lifetime.
I held back because I knew she’d been troubled by something, and on our last day in West Hollywood, Linda finally told me the full details of what was happening in her life.
She’d been accepted to a prestigious graduate program in London, and Sandy Harris—bastard—had blindsided me by not offering Linda a job in his LA office as he promised, but instead one as an assistant road manager on his UK tour for some little-known band named Blackpoll.
Linda was an educated, independent woman.
I couldn’t fault her reasons for not wanting to marry me at that time, and for wanting to pursue two extraordinary opportunities.
She was determined to take care of herself and build her own life, and wasn’t willing to commit to me until she did.
I’d lived this before.
Lena.
I asked Linda to marry me anyway, but I knew how it was going to end before I popped the question to her. Just as I expected, she chose Sandy Harris’s job offer and graduate school instead.
And like an idiot, I let Linda walk out the door.
Straight into the arms of a rock band, and a young kid who was all the hot talk in the industry.
Alan Manzone.
Brilliant guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter.
The insiders called him “the find of a generation.”
Women called him “panty-meltingly beautiful.”
He was addicted to both drugs and women.
Alan “Manny” Manzone.
Even before I met him, his name should have warned me that Alan was the kind of guy who’d be a deal-changer in another man’s life.
By trying to help Linda, I’d crossed her path with his.
Irrevocably linking us all forever.
And two years later, Linda was married.
Forty-Four
I was in New York, walking at night as I often did, when my legs on their own took me down the street where Linda lived.
I hadn’t planned it.
Not consciously.
I just ended up there.
And when I looked across the road at her Central Park West apartment building, I saw her climbing out of the back of a limo and being kissed by Alan.
I stared.
My
heart clenched.
She hadn’t married Alan Manzone. That was what I expected after she’d flown to California to come back to me four months after walking out on me at the West Hollywood Hyatt, only to leave me after a month, yet again, in an unmistakably definitive ending sort of way.
She’d married his bass player and best friend, Len Rowan. In some ways it made losing her harder, since some might see marrying Alan a step up from me—he’d become an international sensation—and, well, Len Rowan, at the risk of sounding arrogant, was a step down from me.
She’d chosen the guy in the background and not the star, though I was pretty sure, with what I head through the gossip vine, she could have had either one of them.
Fuck, she’d chosen Len.
I hadn’t seen her in two years, so I couldn’t stop myself from studying her for a moment, hardly able to take in breath because she was as gorgeous as ever. Different. Hair cropped short, making her face severely beautiful, and visibly a woman very much self-possessed.
It was good to see her looking so well, almost as much as it hurt to see her, and I was about to walk on when her gorgeous brown eyes locked on me and held me there.
Everything about that moment held the feel of that fucking last scene in the movie The Way We Were. And, I sure as hell didn’t want to be Robert Redford standing there alone as Barbara Streisand trotted away from him.
Nope, I’d lived that moment too many times in my life.
But Linda was waiting on her side of the street in a way that told me she expected me come to her, and I couldn’t bring myself to walk away.
I still loved her.
It was late, and traffic was as light as it ever gets in New York City, so I made a casual walk from my side of the street to hers, chiding myself with each step to be gracious and get away quickly.
She had her own life.
I had mine.
There was no point to this.
Except Linda wanted it and I loved her.
I halted close to her. I hadn’t even touched her and my heart was racing so fast it felt like I was going to have a heart attack.
