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EXCERPT FROM THE VOICE, by Robert Yehling
©2007 Robert L. Yehling and Word Journeys, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Reproduction Strictly Prohibited
CHAPTER 2
Tom emerged from the shower, fresh as the love child of steam until the greedy Sacramento Mountain air sucked up the cloud that cocooned him. He wrapped a sea blue towel around his waist, grabbed a comb and walked into the bedroom. He faced the mirror above the walnut dresser he built before starting the studio. He’d put off Megan for years, told her why buy a dresser when he can build one? One day, the long wait ended: She threw his clothes on the floor and he grabbed saw and hammer.
He combed back his gray mane. The locks flopped around the top of his neck, the bottom strands curling upward just beneath his long earlobes. The teeth didn’t snag on thick black curls anymore, but they also didn’t rake bald spots. Chalk one up for genetics, food without growth hormones and a lifetime of avoiding baseball caps. Chalk one up for luck. The cultural fascination for shaved heads never took root within him—not even close. His fascination lay with hair—waves, mountains, curls, streams and flows of hair. He vowed never to lose sight of what hair represented to the beautiful people, not in his songs, not in his ways, not in the way he still sometimes primped like a teen—a quite personal, quite harmless ode to adolescence. Hair proclaimed freedom of expression, freedom to dissent, freedom to create and play, freedom to feel beautiful and powerful at the same time. By the time the tour arrived—how do you know you can even play a note together anymore? And that anyone would care? the droopy eyes in the mirror wanted to know—his locks might touch his shoulders for the first time since Christina wore diapers.
Fever fans knew him with hair. He’d bring back the hair. Everyone over sixty deserved his or her eccentricity. It was well earned.
But what about a voice?
An arm wrapped around his waist. Megan swept a few locks aside and nibbled on his neck, then pecked his cheek. “Ah, a fresh shaven face. One of the seven wonders around here, anymore.”
“Now that the studio’s finished…”
“What have you become? A grizzly woodsman?” Megan reached inside his towel and squeezed his butt. Her cat eyes darted between his butt, chin and cheeks.
“Old and grizzled.”
“Don’t worry…you’ll always look like the kid brother to everyone else in your scene.”
“‘Your scene’? What’s that? Code for ‘your generation’?”
“You are six years older than me.”
“What’s six years, at this point?”
“It could be nothing…or an era.” Megan laughed and rubbed his face. Time had rendered a kind hand. His eyes crouched like two buckskinned wanderers beneath a stout forehead, one of those foreheads that commanded attention , especially when it furrowed. Below his eyes sat soft pouches, vestiges of late, late nights, all those wind-downs from concerts, a lifetime spent night owling. Age thinned his once-bushy eyebrows into the texture of finishing brushes. Squinter’s wrinkles sprang from the sides. His beaked nose jutted from assorted little lines and grooves, like an eagle roosting on a solid bluff. He possessed the facial scape of a man who lived hardest when time remained for youth to rub away the damage and regenerate addled brain cells.
“I’m glad we got away from the excesses before they ate us alive,” Tom said.
Megan pinched the softening skin alongside Tom’s hipbone. “I don’t remember doing much of that with you…”
“Well, as the saying goes, if you remember Woodstock, you weren’t there.”
“Smart ass…but your friends weren’t so lucky.”
Tom cupped his hand over hers, a hold of comfort, security. “I feel them a lot more with me now, because they could be out there doing what we’re about to try, instead of being dead musicians who didn’t live long enough to write and perform their greatest works. Never mind the ‘greatest hits’ that keep coming out—these people were twenty-six, twenty-seven when they died. What about a life’s work? All that passion for living, for creating…we’ll never know.”
The mirror felt like a vacuum tunnel, pulling him into the three, four days at a time he’d spend with these cats, in mindless benders interrupted only by gigs. They were mysterious as galaxies—real self-imploding supernovas, in some cases. Yet, to their fans, the miracle of live music and the immediacy of their words and raw feelings made them seem tight as next-door neighbors chatting over the fence. Meet the beauty and beast of rock stardom. They circulated from scene to scene, partying buddies all, now known universally on a first-name basis. He pictured Janis, roaring past the Panhandle on the back of a motorcycle with a man or woman—it didn’t matter. When she returned, unkempt and hungover, she dragged her guts onstage and spilled them through a voice graveled in pain. He heard the rumors, swirling as they did around Janis like dirt devils in a Texas desert, then marveled with everyone else—fans, famous musicians—as she spilled her blue guts onstage through her voice, pure gravel pain put to sound. Then you had Jim, the best-read, most brilliant twenty-something man he’d ever met, who could break out the wine and talk French literature all night as books spilled from the shelves of his crash pads in Laurel Canyon, L.A., Santa Monica and Venice. Then he ballooned into Jimbo, a redneck marshmallow with a beard.
Exit fun, harmless nights. Enter the making of a dark legend.
Tom watched them drop and die. He remembered the day he decided not to join them. Right after Jimbo took his final bath, while thinking about how close he was to becoming Tombo and losing the woman he loved—the woman whose hands appeared on his belly in the mirror, like a double-vision Addams Family sighting—Tom walked into a YMCA gym. “Do something with me,” he told the wide-eyed clerk, a college girl with a groupie’s smile and an athlete’s rippled body.
“Bend and touch your feet with your fingers,” she said.
He looked limber. His wingspan appeared much longer than his already lofty height. But when he bent over, two things happen: His back popped, and he couldn’t stretch below his knees. Not even with outstretched fingertips.
Exercise and diet replaced substances. No longer did Tom look at the serving platter on stage, divided into five parts—one for each Fever member—and know what kind of show they’d play by the types of drugs on that platter. Lots of speed? Will is going to blow his arms out. LSD or Mescaline? We’re tripping on note patterns. Pot? Some lengthy jams coming up. He banned the platter and its hors d’oeuvres from the stage. It also helped that Megan, a talented cook, took charge of his new workout and diet regimen. Outside of the occasional joint or bottle of wine, she’d kept it clean.
Talk about being scared straight.
Tom turned around, whirled Megan like a dancer, wrapped his arm beneath her breasts, propping them up slightly. She tilted her head into his neck. The subtle retreat of her eyes fascinated him to no end, how they cuddled light so gracefully beneath her deep sockets and still long lashes. What women find unflattering often hits men as glimpses of beauty, depth, wisdom and seasoned sensuality. Tom reminded Megan of it every time she lamented the settling of her eyes, how her sultry looks and mysterious glances kindled his fires, right now, as much as they ever did…and, he noticed, how they did to more than a few young men who raced through all sorts of mental fantasies as they scoped her out. She cast all sorts of expressions that prompted angles and twists of sun, shadow or light to reflect in unique ways from her eyes, adding to the allure that earned her the nickname “Mystical Megan” during the Fever’s rise into the seventies. No wonder the boys kept looking. She had the swagger, trimmings and looks of a prowling cougar…
But she possessed the soul of a one-man huntress. The hunt ended a long time ago. Her eyes now broadcast countless journeys into inner terrain she had no trouble exploring or traversing. Sometimes, he found it overwhelming… I’m not your girlfriend, sweetie—can you talk about these things to your girlfriends? How did she find more stuff to mine, excavate and exhume when they got to what, Tom swore, was the underpinning of the bottom of a feeling or issue? Megan found it. She often challenge him to “enjoy the ride,” a choice of words that felt more like veterans talking to neophytes about running a marathon than a joyride in a race car. “It might be hard, but we need to work through this. Enjoy the ride.” What at first felt like henpecking became revealing, then the wide door to the life that followed. He was no superficial piece of eye candy, either: Listen to the songs. Read the interviews. Yet, she’d go to places that, it seemed, a man needed a stonebreaker to reach—not a mere mortal doing his best to stay in touch with his feelings.
She’d take him there. She eased his way with a smile like the one she now gave him, endowed with full moon lips and a set of gleaming white teeth that belonged on a dental poster, except for slightly crossed incisors that added to her allure. She’d long ago sworn off facelifts, except for a tuck around and beneath her eyes, so what Tom saw now, as always, was the real thing. Her hair sprawled like the open curtain to a priestess’ stage, framing her eyes, then fanning out on her cheekbones before cascading over her shoulders and upper chest. Her face drew to a slightly rounded chin, the same chin she possessed as a younger woman. Her cheekbones and slightly curved nose were souvenirs from an Abenaki Indian comingling with her ancestral blood, Mayflower blood.
When Christina entered high school, when those cheeks began to swell, Megan took up running. Years of oxygen-starved mountain ridge miles shaved off the thirty pounds no Fever fan ever saw in a magazine photo—because she gained it during the return to comfort after the band quit playing. Thanks to marathons, yoga and the new rage—core exercising—she emerged strong and lean as during her years in the White Mountains, the two semesters in Swinging London . She’d become one of those women sliding back the scale of middle age. She reached forward and rubbed lavender lotion on her hands as Tom continued to hold her. He could see the words turning in her eyes: Nothing youthful about these hands. They looked like the hands of working artists who’ve picked up a shovel: Wrinkled backs, long fingertips towering over callused palms. Tom kissed those wrinkles, then nibbled his way to her shoulders. Body shapes and faces could fool the clock, but not hands. Or necks. Hence, Megan’s ensuing fascination with choke bracelets and long necklaces that drifted into sweet repose on her chest.
Where Tom’s hands took rest. A half-woman, half-lion turquoise figurine of the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet hung between her breasts. They swooned like a dancer in mid-dip, gravity deepening their angle but not their shape. Despite Christina’s plaintive plea years ago, back when they became the rage—“C’mon, Mom! Do this for yourself!”—Megan refused implants. Her breasts fit as perfectly in his hands as the day he first caressed them in a plush New Hampshire meadow.
Tom swept her hair from her ear and nibbled on her lobe. The smell of sweet summer grasses and cold rushing waters unlocked from her earlobe as he kissed her…making love on a warm afternoon, amidst thick-bladed grass, butterflies, dandelions, flowers of a half-dozen colors, and mushroom-covered White Mountain woods. So free was the free love of their first full day together that getting to first base was all about hitting a home run.
Thinking again of swinging for the fences, he pursed his lips, found the melody, and whispered as he kissed her neck…
Her heart was something new,
Her heart was something new,
Her heart was something new,
It swept my past away,
I realized in that moment
The world would have its say
But it wouldn’t break our bond,
The world…would have…its say…
Yet she….would live…forever…
In my heart
That she made something new,
Her heart was something new,
Her heart was something…
“The song that sold a million records and broke a million hearts.” Megan unclasped the towel around Tom’s waist, her eyes widening in the mirror. “As for you, I will be more than happy to re-live that afternoon in New Hampshire …right…now.”
The towel fell to the floor.
“Hmmm.” Tom’s lullaby faded.
Megan unwrapped her sarong and let it fall. Her blouse followed. She stepped over the fabric, her upper legs curving like Roman arches. “Bath water’s running. Care to join me?”
“And dinner?”
“It’s waiting in there.”
Dinner caught cold. Tom soaked his aching hands and arms in the bubbles. Megan slid in opposite him. Her toes poked above the bubbles and began to massage his chest. Her legs followed, bubbles clinging to curvy brown calves and knees, her tiny puka shell anklet gleaming against two dozen colored candles that illuminated them. He leaned his head back and soaked in the scents, the lavender, peppermint, geranium, rosemary and God knows what else she threw into the tub. A piano quintet, Dvorak, tickled the speakers he’d built into the wall. She’d found the turn-of-the-century standalone tub at an estate sale, breathed life into it, refurbished it into a font for her daily ritual of candles, essences and submerged relaxation. Since Christina flew off to college, he’d often joined the rites.
Megan sat up and wrapped her arms around Tom’s neck. Her fingers found the nape of Tom’s neck and applied soft pressure, moving lower, circling his skin with her fingertips. Within moments, he purred like a cat. She caressed him until he was both relaxed and aroused, then opened her legs and straddled him. Her aim was perfect, her target taut. Bathwater sloshed a row of candles, the remaining candlelight dancing with pure desire inside her eyes. He glided into her, smoothly, easily, a warmth so familiar yet new as first dawn, as the half-opened eyes riding the building wave in her body. She lifted herself up, squatting, gripping him with the core of her being, the suction of bubbles and water and his slow, deep hip thrusts taking her beyond the sublime. Then she sat down and gripped his shoulders, her lips pursing, her teeth clenching. She marveled at him, at this feeling, through the glazed eyes of an ectastic oracle, the sum of their years and countless acts of love funneled into this very moment…
the essence of holy creation…like no other moment before this…
mattered except to set up…
what was happening…
right now.
Megan arched her back and clasped the back edge of the tub with her hands. Tom gazed at her uplifted nipples, heaving ribcage, small lines of skin pressed together above and below her moon-shaped navel. Water splashed over the rim of the tub, extinguishing more candles. She arched higher, fused, impaled, looming above him like Aphrodite herself, Sekhmet laying claim to her lion. Her womanhood fully opened to the man beneath her, a low cry rising from her womb to her lips, the relieved cry a feeling makes when it reaches dissolution.
She held Tom’s face and kissed him over and over again, as though they were still in that White Mountain meadow while the rest of the musical world started to gather for the generation’s big outdoor blowout on a New York farm. Currents of her energy poured into him, cellular energy, the most beautiful on earth … and then some. He closed his eyes and ran his hands on her goosebumped skin. She moaned into his ear, the moan of an inner body still shaking. His body jerked, sending it right back. Their bodies exchanged energy on waves and tides, imparting a sacred language available only to those rare few who weave hearts, souls and bodies together, then let the physical take them across the bridge into a divine ecstasy. Antakarana.
The phone rang. It rang again. “Let voice mail get it,” Tom said, his words shaky.
“It might be Christina, baby.”
Megan leaned into Tom and lifted herself off him. She swung one leg out of the tub, slowly, then the other. She grabbed a towel and walked into the bedroom, trailing water, bubbles and footprints that zig-zagged on the floor like a faulty alcohol field test. “Coming back?”
She flicked her eyes over her shoulder. “Of course—dinner’s still waiting in there.”
He slid beneath the bubbles, luxuriated in the silken feeling, popped his head up.
“Honey, it’s Raylene.”
Prequel
Chapter 1
The Rest of the Story: The Voice online
