Chapter 79

“Love is the net profit on life.”
—Sharon L. Reddy, Paradox Equation: Parts 1 & 2

22 DECEMBER 2019

I am so glad to be out of school for a couple of weeks. As drained as I feel today, I can’t imagine taking summer school again. I feel like I haven’t had a break since I woke up. I know that’s not true, but something inside me just wants to have time to get in a puppy-pile with my girlfriends and stay there a few weeks.

I got home from my run yesterday and found Beca at the kitchen table in intense negotiations with Pey while Mom watched in amusement. She motioned me to be quiet and I went to get a shower. The upshot of the whole thing was that Beca could sit with me while I play for my recording this morning, ‘because, after all, she is your girlfriend,’ as Pey reminded me. But the trade-off was that we would take her to the mall in the afternoon and then to a movie. Mom had to approve, of course, since she’d have to drive. My probationary license only allowed me one underage passenger so I couldn’t take them both.

I’m a little nervous. Beca and I spent a little while together after the negotiations before I took her over to Joan’s house. She gave me a very sweet kiss before she ran in to be with our girlfriend. “We’re going to have another nice study break,” Beca said. “Maybe sometime you could join us for one.” I could only imagine! I don’t know why I should be so nervous over such a little thing as playing my guitar with her as an audience. I played the day before in the cafeteria. It just seems like such an intimate thing to do in my bedroom.

The powers that be, whoever the hell they are, warned me before they sent V1 to inhabit V2’s body that part of memory was habit and I’d have to work on breaking some of them. Like the slouch when V2 walked. Months of physical therapy helped me get past that and now I even run with my head up instead of my chin against my chest. Managing the dreams was another thing I had to get through.

On the other hand, tapping into what had been years of practice on the guitar and regaining the muscle memory for my fingers was a habit I embraced.

What I didn’t realize was that V1 had habits, too. And V3 was susceptible to them. Before Renie and I moved to the assisted living home, I’d been fond of saying that I got up when I woke up, went to bed when I was tired, ate when I was hungry, and drank when I was thirsty. At seventy-five years old, I was just a big baby. I didn’t realize how true that would be until the staff started insisting I wear an adult diaper to bed.

I thought it would only be V2’s bad habits I had to overcome. But V1 had become lazy. I was retired. My mental processes had slowed and things like playing pinochle had become the important focus of my life. I was certainly not in the habit of going to classes seven hours a day, running two hours a day, studying three hours a day, or practicing three hours a day. I was not in the habit of going out on dates and finding fun—often physically taxing—things to do on them. My girlfriends were usually happy to make out and some to make love. But not all the time. They wanted to go bowling, to movies, to the amusement park, to sports events, to plays, to concerts, to dance. The old man in me was having trouble keeping up with all those activities, let alone thinking them up.

And school wasn’t easy. I won’t say I’d forgotten everything I knew, but it was two generations old. Maybe three. I’d misplaced a lot of my knowledge. When I studied it, I would remember it, like trigonometry and pre-calc. The knowledge was back there but I had to drag it out of a locked storage cabinet in my head to get it where I could use it. And subjects like US History had all those subtle differences to the history I had lived previously.

Granted, slavery had been a huge issue in the Civil War but Ms. Renault, our history teacher, had stressed the fact that a root cause was antidisestablishmentarianism. V1 remembered that as nothing more than the longest word in the English language until Mary Poppins came up with supercalifragilisticexpialadocious. But the South was really pushing for an elitist society in which the church functioned as a kind of royalty and slaves were non-people. Enforcement of constitutional law forbidding establishment of a privileged class met with stiff resistance and ultimately war.

In many areas of the South, the officials of large churches and the officials of large corporations still walked around with a sense of privilege that was missing through most of the North. Human nature, I guess.

Where was I? Studying. It was easier for me to learn a completely new subject like Latin or Music Theory than it was to remember calculus or revise US History. But there were still a lot of times that V1 in my head wanted to just take a nap and skip the term paper that was due the next day. There were times when he was more of a distraction from succeeding in this life than he was a benefactor.

Beca curled up in almost the same position as Pey had been in the week before. In fact, I think Pey coached her on how to lean against me without affecting my playing. In a way, playing with her cuddled to me changed my playing. I’d chosen music composed and played by two of the great classical guitarists of the twentieth century, Julian Bream and Andrés Segovia. Guitar Sonata, Op. 15 by Bream and Lieder Ohne Worte, Op 19 by Segovia were fantastic classical pieces. But I ended the program by mixing in Mason Williams’ Classical Gas. I was sure that would get a rise out of Beca, but when I hit the remote to turn off the recording, she was fast asleep on my shoulder.

That presented a bit of a problem. When Pey went to sleep on my shoulder, I carried her into her room and tucked her in bed. I set my guitar aside and picked up my sleeping girlfriend. I lay down beside her on my bed and she pulled my arm around her. It wasn’t sexual. I wasn’t groping her breasts or humping her ass. We just spooned together holding hands and went to sleep.

“I love you, boyfriend,” she whispered as we woke up and she kissed my fingers. “I feel so safe in your arms.”

“I love you, Rebeca. You will always be safe with me. I promise.”

“You called me Rebeca,” she said, turning toward me. “I still don’t know who she was or why she was so important to you, but I feel so honored that you would call me by her name.”

“One day I’ll be able to tell you. But the name is all yours. I spelled it with one ‘c’.” We giggled, had a little wake-up kiss and I went to my desk to edit the recording and upload it. “People are going to wonder why it’s so late going up today,” I laughed.

“Maybe before they see it they will. When they see me asleep on your shoulder they’ll understand,” she said as she watched. “Thank you, Jacob. I feel ... I feel like you made love to me.”

“I did, sweetheart. I did.”

I suddenly wanted to share that experience with my other girlfriends. They didn’t all need to go to sleep on me. I’d be known as the lullaby king. But I wanted the experience of playing my guitar for them. Touching them or they me while I played something that came from my heart. As much as I wanted to become a writer, I found it so difficult to express those intimate thoughts in words. If Beca could feel like I’d made love to her when I played the guitar, my other girlfriends might also.

Of course, the person I was spending most time with as I played wasn’t one of my girlfriends at all. Cindy and I had two lessons together on Monday. Mrs. Marvel picked me up. She wanted it to be clear to me that we were not dating but this was an important rehearsal for the recital. She hadn’t been entirely in favor of Cindy asking me to perform with her, but was convinced when she saw us working together on the play.

Jannie, Cindy’s flute teacher, was enthused. She’d attended the play as well but hadn’t heard us play the recital pieces yet. She focused on Cindy’s playing, occasionally complimenting my accompaniment or making a suggestion about interpretation that would bring the flute out more. She was very good and even gave a little background on the role of an accompanist in a recital. There would never be a question about whose recital this was. Cindy would play from a position in front of me and do no more than acknowledge me for my contribution to her performance.

We had a light lunch after the lesson and Mrs. Marvel was a lot friendlier. She admitted she’d had misgivings about our working together but was glad Cindy had found an accompanist with an equal passion for the music—and not for her daughter. Cindy blushed.

The lesson with Vinnie was much different. I’d been working with him on my interpretations of the music when I could squeeze a lesson in and he understood my role in the performance. He listened to the opening movement and criticized me for an awkward fingering at one point. Then he simply asked us if there were any spots we thought we were having difficulty with. We shook our heads and he just said that he expected me to have the entire concert memorized, whether I had music in front of me or not.