Page 32 of Night Songs

“No matter what happens, I am yours.”

“Yes,” I gasped.

“And you are mine.”

“Yes.”

I tried to put my hand up her dress, but she batted it away. She kneeled down and took each of my thighs in her strong palms and put her mouth between my legs. I leaned back and pressed my head against the glass of the mirror. I could feel its fragile grit against my skull; I imagined it shattering with the force.

And then, I was shattering, a shower of sparks raining down inside me.

9rhea

1995

When I think of that summer in Nashville, I see Hess and me cruising down a sunflower-lined country road in her blue Mustang convertible, belting Shania Twain’s “Man, I Feel Like a Woman.”

She’d invited me to stay at her house instead of a hotel—she lived alone without a husband or children—and so her place became like a home to me.

Each morning was spent re-creating Belle’s life—we got our hair done at her old salon, we bought pearls at her jeweler, we ate the tangy shreds of her favorite barbecue. I traded in my perfectly soiled Chucks for cowboy boots and squeezed into Belle’s old clothes Hess kept in the attic. It was fun to pretend I was shedding my skin, finally becoming who I’d always been, rather than putting on a costume.

In the afternoons, when Hess was busy with meetings and appearances, I saw Micah.

He’d decided to stay in Nashville for a while, and we spent almost every day together getting to know the city and researching my mother. We went to museums filled with images of her face and her old things that didn’t seem real under the lights. We went to the Grand Ole Opry and the cheesy honky-tonks along Broadway.

Mostly, we talked.

He told me about building a makeshift wrestling ring with his brother in their backyard and diving off the roof of their double-wide. He told me about the first time he saw classical music performed live at the Charleston Symphony; they played Ravel’s “Pavane for a Dead Princess,” and he’d felt emotions he didn’t know existed, like a special, gilded melancholy that stayed with him for weeks after.

I told him about me and Shelli stealing her parents’ liquor at thirteen, and me daring her to slap me across the face, just so I could see what it felt like. I told him about the summer I readDuneand found kinship with Paul and his haunting visions of the future.

In the beginning, it was more curiosity than attraction that pulled me toward Micah. Then as we spent more time together, and he became the person I wanted to talk to most, I could feel a kind of desire starting to creep in, stronger and more sickening than I’d ever felt it before.

I had liked sleeping with boys in high school—bringing them under my control, feeling their need moving against mine, briefly smothering the ache I felt to be touched. I only ever saw them as bodies, and I preferred when afterward they would disappear.

There was something different about Micah’s honeyed accent, and I wanted to know what he thought about everything. When we weren’t together, I obsessed over when I would see him next.

But he hadn’t tried to kiss me, and I worried he only saw me as a friend.

For all of his wiliness and emotion, he could be incredibly disciplined. He was this mix of impulsivity and restraint, of primitive man and gentleman, and it left room for me to be the same. Both creature and girl.

That summer, Hess was the headliner for the Fourth of July show at the Tennessee State Fair. I’d never been backstage at a concert venue, and the frantic, sweat-soaked urgency of it was overwhelming. People breezed inand out of Hess’s air-conditioned dressing room, paying their respects to the “grand dame,” while I sat in the corner and listened to my Discman.

I’d started my music education with Belle’s first album,Clayton & Belle. She recorded it with her first husband, Clayton Redd, and the cover featured the wedding photo I’d seen in Bellewood. Now when I looked at it, I saw the commanding look in her eyes and not the helpless child bride.

My favorite track was “Pretty Little Lady,” which felt more like her than the rest of the songs that skewed a bit sappy. I could see her smirking as she wrote it, her eyes filled with mirth. I imagined us laughing over its irony, she and I the same age at the same time, no longer two trains passing in the night.

Hess had hired guitar and voice teachers so I could learn to make my own music, but the fingerings felt unnatural, and my voice was mediocre at best. I spent most of the lessons eyeing the clock, wishing I was lounging in the backyard with a sweet tea.

When Hess’s dressing room got too crowded, I went to the wing and watched the show from the side in the sweltering air. I’d learned to sink into the wet heat like a bath and let my body become one with it.

One of the featured rising stars was performing—a twiggy brunette with tall, feathered hair and huge rhinestone earrings. There was a gravelly quality to her voice that made you lean in closer. As I swayed to her music, I felt someone come up next to me.

“Can you believe I found her singing at a little resort in the Ozarks?”

I recognized his twinkling, vintage movie-star eyes from the wedding photo. “You’re Clayton Redd.”

“Yes, ma’am. It’s nice to see you.”