“She stayed in the closet?” Jake asked.
Steph shook her head. “It was more than that,” she said. “She didn’t even let herself be free enough to get into the closet in the first place. Most of us dykes go through that to some degree when we first start to realize who and what we are, but most of us accept it at some point, whether we stay in the closet or not. Clarissa was one of the ones who could not accept what she was. Part of it was her upbringing—she was raised a strict Catholic—and part of it is societal views toward homosexuality. Nobody wants to willingly be part of a hated and mistrusted minority. And so, she played the game with classic overcompensation. She dated man after man, was extremely loose with her affections toward them, sleeping with any male who so much as hinted that he would like to get into her pants. And she enjoyed none of it, got nothing out of it. She was miserable, Jake, and she used to cry to me about how she couldn’t find a decent man to have a relationship with, all the while denying what was right in front of her.”
“That’s kind of sad,” Jake said. “What happened to her? Did she eventually come around?”
“I tried to explain to her one night what she was,” Steph said softly, her words almost drowned out by the sound of the engines turning. “She didn’t want to hear it. She knew that I was a lesbian, of course, but she always used to talk about my sexuality like it was a phase I was going through, like it was something that I would grow out of. Anyway, when I suggested to her that she was gay ... she got angry with me. She started accusing me of trying to ‘convert’ her. Our relationship was never the same after that. She stopped hanging out with me. She stopped rooming with me during away games. Within a week she was dating some dweeb she met in a computer class. They ended up getting married her senior year.”
“How did that work out?” Jake asked.
“They got divorced after less than a year,” she said. “And she went back to the same pattern of sleeping with any man who asked. She started drinking a lot, got into drugs, couldn’t find a job. Two years after graduation, she committed suicide by jumping off a freeway overpass into the path of an oncoming semi-truck.”
“Wow,” Jake said. “That’s not a happy story.”
“No,” Steph agreed, “but it inspired me to write a pretty good song, don’t you think?”
They bought three hundred and forty-five pounds of groceries and household supplies from the Eugene Costco store and then transported them back to Mahlon Sweet Airport by cab. Jake loaded them in various places throughout the plane, taking care to make sure the weight was evenly distributed.
The flight back was a little less somber.
“I have to say,” Steph told him after the sterile cockpit condition was lifted, “it’s been really weird living in a house with you all.”
“What do you mean?” Jake asked.
“Well, you’re famous, a major celebrity,” she said. “And yet, at the same time, you’re an ordinary person.”
“Ordinary is a strong word,” Jake said with a chuckle.
“You know what I mean,” she said. “I feel ... oh ... schizophrenic sometimes, like this is all a dream. I have dinner with you and Laura and Nerdly. I go running with you in the morning. We sit down and drink wine together and have ordinary conversations, just like normal people have. And then you fly off for a few days and I turn on the television and there you are, with Bigg G, up on the screen playing music for the country.”
“We were lip-synching,” Jake told her.
“That’s not the point,” she said. “You’re Jake fucking Kingsley! The Jake fucking Kingsley. And that redhead who shares the bedroom with you is Laura Best, who I’ve seen in the tabloids. And the guy engineering this album we’re recording is Nerdly Archer. And you hang out with Bigg G, and Celia Valdez, and Greg Oldfellow. I just saw Greg Oldfellow in a movie right before we came here! When I sit down and think about all this, it just blows me away. I have to keep asking myself if this is really happening. And when I decide it is, I ask myself what we did to deserve this.”
“You’re all talented musicians and composers,” Jake said. “You deserve this chance. You’ve paid your dues and you’ve earned it. I’m just making sure you get your best shot.”
“We’re all very grateful for what you’ve done for us, Jake,” she said.
“Think nothing of it,” he said. “I expect to profit handsomely from the efforts. I only wish you were all able to participate in the mixing process. I feel kind of bad that you all have to go back to work while the Nerdlys and I do the most important part without your input.”
“We wouldn’t know what we were doing anyway,” Steph said. “Even Jim, who recorded two albums before, wouldn’t know a mixing board from his ass.”
“I didn’t know shit about it either when I first started in the business. But it’s a skill that has to be learned if one is going to put one’s heart and soul down on an album. Maybe on the next Brainwash album we’ll have more time, or you’ll have the ability to take leave.”
She looked at him. “Do you really think there’s going to be a next album?” she asked.
He smiled. “Yeah,” he told her. “I really think there is.”
They landed uneventfully at North Bend just before three o’clock that afternoon. Jake secured the airplane in his rented hangar and the two of them spent fifteen minutes loading the groceries into the back of the van they used to transport everyone to and from the studio.
Once they arrived back at the house on the cliff, everyone except Laura and the smaller children pitched in and had everything unloaded and carried inside in no time at all. As Jake was putting away the toilet paper in the storage closet upstairs, he heard the phone ringing downstairs. It rang three times before someone picked it up. A few moments went by and then Laura’s voice called up to him, telling him he had a phone call.
What now? he wondered, a trifle uneasily as he trotted down to the main living room. Receiving phone calls at the house was still an unusual event. And when they did come, they usually were not for Jake. And if they were for Jake, they usually were not good news.
Laura was sitting on the couch, sipping from a large glass of iced tea and holding the phone in her hand. As Jake got close to her, he could smell that she’d been hitting the pipe again. She was doing that more and more lately.
“Who is it?” he asked.
“It’s Jill,” she said. “She says she has news for you.”
Jake’s mood improved a bit at her words. She could only be calling about the property in San Luis Obispo that he wanted to buy. The survey teams had all issued their reports on it the previous month and the news had been good at that time. There were no zoning restrictions that would prevent Jake from building a house on the land. There were no geological issues that would prevent a house from being built either. A test well had established that there was ample groundwater and that it was not brackish from ocean contamination. And power could easily be strung in from the power lines along the roadway, though at a fairly steep price. With this information in hand, Jake had put an offer in on it just before Jill and family had left for Japan.
He took the phone from Laura’s hand. “Hey, Jilly,” he said into it. “Good to hear from you. How was the motherland?”
“We had a great time!” she said enthusiastically. “And best of all, we did everything we wanted to do there for less than three hundred dollars a day!”
“That is something to be proud of, all right,” he remarked. “I assume you took lots of pictures?”