"For what?" she asked.
"For bringing your music into my house tonight."
"Thanks," she said. It touched her that it seemed to mean so much to him. "Sorry I woke your kids."
He shook his head. "I never would have asked you to play. But I hoped. Isn't that stupid? I tuned my guitar for you, and then I hid it upstairs, and you found it anyway. Karma, right?"
It took a moment for her to realize what it meant, him saying that. In this town she had never touched a musical instrument or even told anybody that she played guitar. So why did he know to tune it for her?
"I'm such a fool," she whispered. "I thought my disguise was so perfect."
"I love your music," he said. "Since I heard the first note of it. Your songs have been at the heart of all the best moments of my life."
"How did you know?"
"You've done it before," he said. "Dropped out. Lived under an assumed name. Right? It took a while for me to realize why you looked so familiar. I kept coming back in to the cafe until finally I was sure. When you talked to me that day, you know, when you chewed me out, your voice -- I had just listened to your live album that morning. I was pretty sure then. And tonight when you played, then I really knew. I wasn't going to say anything, but I had to thank you ... for the music. Not just tonight, all of it. I'm sorry. I won't bother you again."
She was barely hearing him, though; her mind had snagged on the phrase he said before: Her songs had been at the heart of all the best moments of his life. It made her weak in the knees, those words. Because it meant that she was part of this, after all. Through her music. Her songs had all her longings in them, everything she'd ever known or felt or wished for, and he had brought those songs into his life, had brought her into his home. Of course Dougie thought she sounded like his dad's records -- they had grown up hearing her songs. She did belong there in that house. He had probably known her music before he even knew his wife.
And now he was going to turn away and go on down the stairs and out to his car and leave her here alone and she couldn't let him go, not now, not now. She reached out and caught his arm; he stopped on the next-to-top step and that put them at the same level, and she kissed him. Kissed him and clung to him, kissed him and tasted the honey in his mouth. His arms closed around her. It was maddening to have their thick winter coats between them. She reached down, still kissing him, and fumbled to unbutton her coat, then his; she stepped inside his coat as if it were his bedroom. She pressed herself against him and felt his desire, the heat of his body.
At last the endless kiss ended, but only because she was ready to take him inside her room, to share with him what she knew he needed from her. She stepped up into her doorway and turned to lead him in.
He was rebuttoning his coat.
"No," she said. "You can't go now."
He shook his head and kept fastening the buttons. He was slow and clumsy, with his gloves on.
"You want me, Douglas Spaulding, and I need you more than you know."
He smiled, a shy, embarrassed smile. "Some fantasies can't come true," he said.
"I'm not fantasizing you, Douglas Spaulding."
"I'm fantasizing you," he answered.
"I'm real," she said. "You want me."
"I do," he said. "I want you very much."
"Then have me, and let me have you. For one night. Like the music. You've had my music with you all these years. I want the memory of your love with me. Who could begrudge us that?"
"Nobody would begrudge us anything."
"Then stay with me."
"It's not me you love," said Douglas, "and it's not my love you want."
"No?"
"It's my life you love, and my life you want."
"Yes," she said. "I want your life inside me."
"I know," he said. "I understand. I wanted this life, too. The difference between us is that I wanted it so much I did the things you have to do to get it. I set aside my career ambitions. I moved away from the city, from the center of things. I turned inward, toward my children, toward my wife. That's how you get the life I have."
Against her will, there were tears in her eyes. Feeling him slip away she wanted him all the more. "So you have it, and you won't share, is that it?"
"No, you don't understand," he said. "I can't give it to you."
"Because you're afraid of losing it yourself. Afraid of what all these small-minded people in this two-bit town will think."
"No, Rainie Pinyon, I'm not afraid of what they'll think of me, I'm afraid of what I'll know about myself. Right now, standing here, I'm the kind of man who keeps his promises. An hour from now, leaving here, I'd never be that kind of man again. It's the man who keeps his promises who gets the kind of life I have. Even if nothing else changed, I'd know that I was not that man anymore, and so everything would be changed. It would all be dust and ashes in my heart."
"You are a selfish bastard and I hate you," said Rainie. At the moment she said it, she meant it with all her heart. He was forbidding her. He was refusing her. She had offered him real love, her best love, her whole heart. She had allowed herself to need him and he was letting some idiotic notion of honor or something get in the way even though she knew that he wanted her too.
"Yeah," he said. He turned and walked down the stairs. She closed the door and stood there with her hand on the knob as she heard him start the car and drive away. It was hot in her apartment, with the heater on, with her coat on. She pulled it off and threw it against the door. She pulled off her sweater, her shoes, all her clothes and threw them against the walls and crawled into bed and cried, the way she used to cry when her mother didn't let her do what she needed to do. Cried herself to sleep.
She woke up with the sun shining into her window. She had overslept. She was late for work. She jumped out of bed and got dressed, hurrying. Minnie will be furious. I let her down.
But by the time she had her clothes on, she knew the truth. She had overslept because in her heart she knew she was done with this place. She had no reason to get up early because working for Minnie Wilcox wasn't her job anymore. She had found all that she was looking for when she first dropped out and went searching. Her music was back. She had something to sing about again. She could go home.
She didn't even pack. Just took her purse with all her credit cards and walked to the post office, which was where the buses stopped. She didn't care which one -- St. Louis, Chicago, Des Moines, Cairo, Indianapolis, any bus that got her to an airport city would do. It turned out to be St. Louis.
By the time she saw the Gateway Arch she had written a song about feeding the baby of love. It turned out well enough that it got her some decent radio airplay for the first time in years, her first top- forty single since seventy-five.
Tried to walk that lonely highway
Men and women, two by two
Promising, promising they will be true
You went your way, I'll go my way
Feeling old and talking new
Whatever happened to you?
I wonder what happened to you?
Spoke to someone in the air
Heard but didn't heed my prayer
Couldn't feed it anyway
Didn't have the price to pay
You got to feed the baby
Hungry, hungry, hungry baby
Got to feed the baby of love
She had her music back again, the only lover that had ever been faithful to her. Even when it tried to leave her, it always came home to her in the end.