Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire (22 page)

That was the time that I was really tempted to try to get in touch with her, to show her that I’d done it after all, the way she had always believed I would. I thought maybe she really might want me to get in touch with her now. She may have been The Voice to the world, but I was the one who had heard The Voice first. Before she had sung for anyone else, she had sung for me.

I wish you all remembered her world tour. I was at the state university then, majoring in parties and becoming radicalized, when I found out she was going to play that blot on the New England escutcheon we had both escaped. I’d go see her in both places, I decided. I was still going back to see my mother once in a while; I could make an extra trip for Kathy.

Eddie Gibbs was long gone, as far as I knew. He’d joined the Army right after graduation and been shipped off to somewhere in Southeast Asia. Too bad, I thought, he’d never get a chance to see what he’d missed.

So I went. She was as thin as ever, maybe even a little thinner. Her hair had grown out long, down past her shoulders. Sometimes, when she moved her head in a certain way, it reminded me of a nun’s veil; I wondered how she was living and with who, if anyone.

I wondered through her rendition of “Tobacco Road,” and then was startled to hear my name mentioned.

“This next song I also stole, from four good kids who could probably have a hit single with it, and maybe they will. But not till I’m done with it. This is for my friend who always said she was getting out. I hope she got out.”

A wave of laughter swept through the audience—I swear, she could have stood up there and castigated everyone and they would all still have loved her. She waited a beat and then launched into “I’m Not There.”

No one told you about me

The way I cried . . .

Nobody told you about me

How many people cried . . .

. . . don’t bother trying to find me

I’m not there . . .

Very spooky song, and not in a good way. If there was such a thing as being allergic to a song, I was allergic to that one. I couldn’t stand to listen to it, watching her move back and forth across the stage, looking carefully at all the upturned faces.

I knew she was searching for me, and, suddenly, I didn’t want her to find me. During the break, I pushed through all the people milling around and got outside none too soon. My stomach had been turning over and over. Much to the disapproval of some of the well-muscled group in T-shirts that proclaimed Security front and back, I puked into a garbage can just outside the hall and then went back to my mother’s. I figured that would be the end of it, but I was wrong. Again.

“It took a while to find you,” she said on the telephone. Her speaking voice, as well as The Voice, sounded just the way I remembered, full and textured.

“What do you want?” I asked her. “I mean, you seem to have everything.”

“I’d give it all up just to get some peace of mind.” I thought that was a pretty weird thing to say. I couldn’t think of how to respond her. “There aren’t any easy answers,” she added, as if she had read my mind. “I’m just letting you know how I feel.”

I switched the receiver to my other ear. “And how do you feel?”

“Did you stay long enough to hear ‘I’m Not There’?” she asked suddenly. “That’s the song I stole. That’s what they call it when you take a song someone else wrote and change it to fit your own preference. Did you like it?”

“It was strange,” I said.

“But did you like it?” There was such an urgent note in her voice, I felt I had to be completely honest.

“No.”

She gave a short laugh. “No. You wouldn’t. Because you are there, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. I’m here.” I paused. “You’re the one who left.”

“No,” she said patiently, “I wasn’t there to begin with. I was never there. Because no one told you about me.”

“Don’t,” I said.

“Don’t what—tell you?”

“You’re not telling me anything, you’re just spooking me. I was hanging on because you were supposed to be there to hang on with me. You believed—”

“No, you believed,” she said snappishly.

“And you let me.”

There was a long pause. “Yes,” she said at last. “I suppose I did.” She paused again. “Is there anything—has there ever been anything—that you’d give it all up for?”

I laughed. “What have I ever had to give up?”

“Everything.”

I laughed some more. “‘Everything.’ Jesus, Kathy, I think you’re getting your ‘everything’ confused with my ‘everything.’ In case you hadn’t noticed, you’ve got a hell of a lot more in your ‘everything’ than I do in mine.”

“It wasn’t always that way,” she said gravely. I squirmed a little because I had just been thinking something along the same lines.

“No, but it sure is now, isn’t it?” I sighed. “What did you call for, Kathy? And how did you know to call me here?”

“I was hoping I’d find you.”

“You were hoping I’d still be living here?”

“No. That you’d come back here for the concert.”

I was annoyed with myself for being so predictable. “Okay. So why did you call?”

“I wanted to ask you if you thought there was anything in this life that you’d give up everything for?”

I sighed. “Don’t tell me—you’re top of the charts and suddenly you think you have a calling to become a nun.”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“Answer the question.”

“I can’t,” I said, annoyed. “It’s your question, not mine. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Another one of those pauses. I couldn’t even hear her breathe. “You’re right. I can’t ask you a question I’m supposed to answer. So let me ask you this: Do you think you could ever forgive me?”

I hadn’t expected that one at all. “For what? For leaving me to get it all figured out on my own? Build my own life?”

“Among . . . other things,” she said, a bit hesitant.

“Yeah, sure. What the hell. Forgiveness is one of the cornerstones of the Church we grew up in. And you can take the girl out of the Church, but you can’t take the Church out of the girl, right?”

Kathy didn’t laugh. “Oh, you’d be surprised what you can do if you want to badly enough.”

“I would?”’

“You will.” Dead line. It was the last thing she ever said to me. In that life.

“I’m Not There” took off like an epidemic. It was really like that. People got infected with it. I didn’t understand it, it was the world’s biggest downer, and yet it seemed like you couldn’t put on a radio without hearing it five times an hour. The world tour kept adding shows and dates, and it looked like she planned to spend the rest of her life touring and singing “I’m Not There.” Rock groups were fighting each other to open for her, and she couldn’t walk down a street in any city or town without getting mobbed.

Still, the news about her was either very sparse or very controlled. What interviews she gave were enigmatic at best, and made her sound like a weirdo at worst. Which I guess she was, thanks to her parents.

I thought about them a lot, wondered if they were touched by Kathy’s good fortune. The house always looked the same on my visits back to Blight City, and there was never anything about her parents or her hometown in the news about her. As if she had x-ed it all out of her life and reinvented herself. She wouldn’t have been the first.

Ultimately, I couldn’t blame her. Some impulse made me drop into the chapel on campus and light a candle for both Kathy and me. Peace between us, I thought. Or maybe prayed is a better word for it. I hoped that when she called again—if she ever did—we’d be friends.

My clock radio woke me the next morning with the news of her suicide.

There was the usual controversy, lots of editorials about how fame, success, and money couldn’t buy happiness. Crowds holding vigils outside the concert hall where she was to have performed that night, prayer services, tributes by various of the rock aristocracy.

I spent that day in a state of shock. Without thinking about it, I threw some clothes and books in a bag, went down to the bus station, and bought a ticket home. I was too much of a zombie to cope with anything more demanding than a bus. I couldn’t even register the passage of time—I got on the bus, then I got off the bus. Then I walked one step after another through a darkness until I saw the lights in the windows and I knew I was at the house.

Kathy’s mother answered the door. She only looked at me and then turned away, disappearing into the kitchen. Barbara and Sarah were sitting on the couch in the living room. All these years and it was the same couch. Sarah looked as if someone had been threatening her with a beating; she was all but cowering while Barbara sat holding both her hands. Barbara was bigger than she’d been the last time I’d seen her, not fat, just husky, like an athlete.

Barbara and I gazed at each other for a long moment. Then she flicked a glance at the staircase leading to the second floor. I nodded and went up.

Her father was in her room, sitting on her bed with his hands on his knees. “What do you want?” he said.

The room was just as it had been back when she had sung for me, a thousand years ago in this empty house. I went over to her desk and put on her radio.

“ . . . vigil in London at the Odeon, as well as in cities across America,” a disc jockey was saying solemnly. “At a candlelight service in Manhattan, protest singer Bob Dylan performed a new song he called ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,’ which he says he wrote specifically for—”

Kathy’s father was at the desk so quickly I flinched. He snapped the radio off. “Lady,” he sneered. “She was no lady. She was just another teenaged whore with hot pants. Like you. She took off because what she was getting here wasn’t enough for her, she had to have them by the dozens—”

I backed away from him, looking around for something to defend myself with, in case he got violent.

“I knew you would start bringing them around here for her. I know your kind, I know.”

Even if there had been anything vaguely like a weapon handy, I don’t think I’d have known how to use it. I felt as if I were shrinking in the face of this creature passing for human. I turned and ran for the door.

He caught the back of my collar just as I put my hand on the doorknob. The neck of my shirt pressed into my windpipe, choking me, but I managed to get the door open. He was trying to reel me in, but I clamped both hands on either side of the doorway, braced myself, and opened my mouth to scream.

Kathy was standing in the hallway, near the top of the stairs. The sight startled me so much, I froze. Fortunately, Kathy’s father saw her too, and stopped struggling with me as well.

“You!” he growled at her, and shoved me aside. I fell to the floor and scrambled up again quickly, watching him advance on Kathy. She didn’t yell or scream or try to run away—she just stood there and let him come at her.

For a few moments, his body hid her completely, and I screamed as hard and as loud as I could, as if I were trying to stun him with sound. “Stop!”

Kathy’s father turned on me, letting her go. She sagged against the banister and I saw that it wasn’t Kathy as I had last seen her, but Kathy at fourteen. “Lesbo!” he snarled at me. “Is that it, you’re teaching her your dirty little girlie tricks, is that it, lesbo?”

Panic was like an electric shock. I couldn’t make myself do anything except point at Kathy, fourteen-year-old Kathy on the stairs, watching her father and me with the strangest expression of calm detachment. Was she really there, was she—?

His hand went completely around my biceps, because suddenly I was only fourteen myself. He dragged me toward the stairs as if I weighed nothing. I tried to pull away and I thought my arm would tear out of the socket. He was cursing and ranting about dirty little girls and pulling me to the head of the stairs. I clung to the banister just next to where Kathy was standing and looked up at her. She seemed about to say something, but then I felt my feet become entangled with her father’s legs. There wasn’t even time to yell Ouch—we were on our way down the stairs together the quick way.

I was pretty sure we hit every step, separately and together. At each impact, I could hear a collection of different noises, some of it music, some of it just voices, and sometimes just her voice. The Voice.

No one told you about me Though they all knew . .
.

Sometime later, I had stopped falling down the stairs, but a big hole must have opened up in the floor because I was still falling, but through empty space, unimpeded even by the vision of Kathy leaning over me and explaining,
“ . . . my eyes are clear and bright, but I’m not there.”

And she wasn’t, and neither was I.

I woke up here, where you all believe I’ve been waking up every day for ten of the last thirty years. I’m not disoriented; I can remember what you remember of this world. But I also remember that world. I know there’s no going back to the way things were.

The funny thing is, if she’d asked me, if Kathy had just asked me, I might have done it for her anyway. Except I’d have tried a lot harder to fix it so that we could both come out with something better for each of us.

If she had told me, back then, I would have helped her. I wouldn’t have just looked the other way. I’d have believed her. After all, she believed in me.