"No. Some other time."

I think about it for a split second.

"You're asking me on a date?"

He grins.

The smile comes before I can fight it, and I say, "Oh, Clive, this is so misguided."

"I like older women," he announces proudly.

"But I'm too much older," I say, not even bothering to do the math. But in no time, I've already played the scene out in my head. We have dinner in a cheap Italian restaurant, we drink too much wine, he takes me back to my trailer, he thinks the trailer is cool, he thinks I'm fantastic, I put on some Joni Mitch.e.l.l, he likes me even more, I don't mind kissing him, I don't mind his hands on my b.r.e.a.s.t.s, I'm not afraid to be naked, I'm telling him what to do, he does it just fine.

And then the morning. Always the morning.

And then I'm pregnant. I'm pregnant! I call Mark and say, Guess who else is having a baby? and he is wild with jealousy, and he agrees to keep paying for my car, and in fact, he wants to talk to me, wants to tell me how stupid Stephanie is, how he wishes that he and I were having a baby together, and he asks me, How did this ever happen? And I tell Clive I'm pregnant, and he gets scared and dumps me, and then I tell Franklin I'm pregnant and I have to drop out of the band, and he falls in love with me because another man has gotten me knocked up, and then he agrees to raise the baby, and he forgets about the bluegra.s.s band and session work and McCoy's and he gets a real job with his MBA and the baby comes.

And then he looks at me as if I'm a stain on the carpet.

Clive says, "Listen, I'll tell you a secret about me."

"Don't."

He says, "My first lover was my high school English teacher. She was fifteen years older than I was. It didn't last long. Then I dated girls my age. But the pattern is set, you know? It's like playing the ba.s.s. It's the rhythm. The rhythm exists in your head. You hear it and you play it. You don't ask why."

I say, "Only children don't ask why."

He looks wounded when I say this. Good, I think. Good.

"Go home," I tell him. "Look in the mirror. Remember who you are. And that relationship was a mistake. The first one often is. The first one is just a matter of exploring your dark side."

He has lost interest in fighting me. Now he just wants to know what I mean.

"What was your first relationship?"

My first relationship. It ended in marriage.

"It was a mistake," I tell him. "I've been trying to escape it ever since."

Now he is standing on the sidewalk, looking like a little boy, much as he must have looked to his high school English teacher, who saw the bait and took it. She was a vampire. She was a thief. He is not ready to hear that.

I have to leave him with some dignity, so I say, "Thank you for asking. It is very flattering, but even if you were the right age for me, I'm not dating right now."

"Well, all right. But why? Why aren't you dating?"

"Because I'm still married," I tell him.

He seems surprised. "I thought you were divorced."

"On paper," I say.

He seems to hear this. Then he gives me a noncommittal wave and walks off down the street, his electric ba.s.s in a gig bag, b.u.mping against his hip.

And I smile, in spite of everything, because of everything. Because I know now that Franklin saw this coming, and he wanted to head it off at the pa.s.s. Franklin wants me to himself.

It is the good news and the bad news.

WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN, Carolyn Millner's mother stopped teaching me violin. She had to. Carolyn was fully entrenched as a popular girl by then, and she simply couldn't tolerate me in her house. She told her mother this several times before it sunk in. Mrs. Millner loved me and loved teaching me, because she had glimpsed my talent, and true musicians always enjoy setting that thing loose from its cage. But in the end, a mother is always going to choose her daughter.

By then, I knew enough about technique, and I played music by ear, so I took my violin home and started teaching myself the rest. It drove my father crazy, hearing the scratchy scales coming out of my room, enduring my experiments with vibrato, listening to a single composition played a dozen and a half times.

Partly it was because the sounds in my room wounded his ears. But it was also because he was a churchgoing man, and when my music sounded right, he knew, on some level, that I had invited G.o.d into my own little microcosm and that he, my father, was losing his grip on me. I was sixteen and on the verge of losing him altogether. He was, or claimed to be, a devout Christian, and his sole purpose in life by the time I grew b.r.e.a.s.t.s was to keep me away from men. He knew I couldn't actually love Mozart, a man with a ponytail who was long dead, but he heard me loving him, anyway, and it drove him crazy.

This was somewhere in the South in the 1970s. The war was grinding to a halt, Nixon was leaving, nuclear missiles were poised and ready to fly, the civil rights movement was under way and gaining ground. It was all too much for a simple man. My father prided himself on being simple, but a truer description was that he was elemental. He couldn't trust what he didn't understand, and he didn't understand much. There wasn't much left in his control, but he could be d.a.m.n certain that I wasn't having s.e.x.

I wasn't having s.e.x. That fact was not enough for him.

He came to my room one night and said, "All a poor girl has is her reputation."

I said, defiantly (and not really understanding my history, which is where defiance comes from), "We're not poor."

He said, "If I see you running around with boys, I will put a stop to it."

I thought he meant boys. He really meant music.

I started listening to Led Zeppelin and Bruce Springsteen, playing along with their violin parts. I also started wearing short cutoffs in the summer. My hormones were all over the place. So were my b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

I started making out with Johnny Pitt in the backseat of his Mustang. He knew how to kiss, and he found my b.r.e.a.s.t.s and gently pinched my nipples between his thumb and forefinger. It was enough for me. I started wearing colored mascara and Baby Soft perfume.

One night, my father came to my room and said, "Your mother and I are losing control of you."

I was sitting on my eggsh.e.l.l-colored carpet, looking at the alb.u.m cover of the Rolling Stones' Goats Head Soup. There was a song on the record called "Dancing with Mr. D," and another that everybody called "Starf.u.c.ker." The world was opening up before me like a flower.

I said nothing.

He said, "I am taking your violin away."

I shrugged. "Take it," I said.

He did.

I didn't object. I had lost interest in it. I was more interested in what Keith Richards did with a guitar and what Johnny Pitt did with my b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

After he took my violin, he took my records. I never knew what became of the records. I started listening to the radio.

We lived in this old Victorian mansion on the main street of a small town. The sound traveled quickly through the house and almost as quickly through the town. He took my stereo away. Then I was left with my transistor radio. Which was where I heard all the best music, on AM stations from places as far away as Chicago. I heard Lou Reed and Mountain and Todd Rundgren and MC5 and the entire world of Motown. I heard Al Green and Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye. Marvin Gaye was the best. Marvin Gaye did what Johnny Pitt wasn't brave enough to do. And when I heard my father pacing outside my room, I knew that he was aware of what was happening in there. I wasn't just having s.e.x. I was having s.e.x with a black man.

By the time I was seventeen, I had lost my virginity, not in the way I had imagined, not in the way I had hoped, but to a boring prep school student in town, who was destined for greatness but wanted a taste of trash before he moved on. My mother knew it was happening. I never told her, but she knew. His name was Shreve Carter. His parents had money. My mother thought I might get some of it. My father knew I was being used.

I came home from school one day, my senior year, to find my father raking leaves in the backyard. My mother was gone. Shopping for groceries, he said. He never told me why he was home from work so early. He was just raking leaves. There were several small fires in the yard. It was legal to burn leaves in your yard in those days.

I walked out and stood beside him, inhaling the dangerously beautiful smell of the end of fall, the end of spring, the end of everything. It was a curious aspect of my personality that I preferred endings to beginnings. One of the fires was burning brighter than the others. I walked over to it and peered down. At the center of the pile of leaves was my beautiful violin, burning up, wilting and shriveling in the heat.

I almost wanted to grab it. But I didn't. I had let it go. I had abandoned it. I looked at my father.

He said, "I guess that will teach you."

It did, and it didn't.

I WALK INTO my trailer and sit down on my couch. I pick up a magazine and toss it away. I pick up the TV remote control and toss that away, too. I take my violin out of its case. I stare at it. I have never felt safe enough to love it, not since the day I saw its sister, its cousin, its distant relative, being burned at the stake.

I could be having s.e.x with Clive right now, I think.

I don't want s.e.x, I remind myself. I want the other thing.

Some other thing.

I have never been able to define the other thing. It nags at me and scratches at the door like a stray cat. Sometimes I think it is G.o.d, but G.o.d wouldn't grovel, I figure. G.o.d wouldn't scratch at the door. Still, there has always been a voice nagging at me, telling me to pick up an instrument and play. It can't be my conscience. It can't be my ego. It is something against my will, begging for a song.

Sometimes, in a desperate moment, I think it is a phantom audience, a collection of ghosts, asking me to remind them of the virtue of being alive. If you are chosen to play music, you can hardly stop yourself from identifying with the Pied Piper. The Pied Piper, who rid a town of deadly rats, was not paid for his services, so in order to exact revenge, he led all the children away from the town, hypnotizing them with his beautiful music. I always understood that story. The people failed to see his magic, so he used his magic against them. And the fact that he used it on their children seems particularly fitting. The children wanted to go. Like musicians, they were misunderstood. They were looking for a way out.

The problem is, the Pied Piper never surrendered his flute. He knew it was his weapon. Without it, he would have been powerless.

My violin disappeared in a matter of minutes. I watched it dissolve until it blended with the leaves. Only the strings remained. They looked like scary, long fingernails. They curled on the ends. As they curled, they made a sound. They made music, even in death.

My father paid for me to go to a second-rate college. I studied journalism. I learned how to write. I was broken; I was burned, like the instrument. I carried around this guilt, knowing that my abandonment of the violin resulted in its death, same as if I had put a baby in a Dumpster.

But when I was a junior in college, I realized I had to fulfill a music requirement. I took a violin cla.s.s. I had to. They made me. After the third cla.s.s, my teacher said, "I can't do anything more with you. You are better than I am. You need to play with an orchestra or a band."

So I did. So I was back. My father was sick by then. He couldn't stop me. He had done his best.

It was too late by then, anyway. The secret was out. You can't kill music. You can only hide it. But it will be found. It lives to be found.

Maybe this was what my father was always trying to tell me: Once you find it, you are a slave to it forever. You serve it; it doesn't serve you. You can no longer pretend to be the master of your universe. As I sit alone in my trailer, realizing that I could be having s.e.x, I let myself consider this possibility: that my father always knew s.e.x was a weak subst.i.tute. s.e.x is dangerous, s.e.x distracts, s.e.x kills. But unlike music, it cannot disarm you. It cannot own you. He was asking me to choose between the lesser of two evils, or perhaps the weaker of two masters.

In any case, he succeeded. Because now I am alone in a trailer park, without a man, without a cat, staring at an instrument I'm afraid to touch.

8.

THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, Franklin and I play an open mic at the Cow's End in Venice. It's a hip coffeeshop on a hip street near the Venice pier. The s.p.a.ce is nice, even though we have to play on a glorified balcony, and the acoustics are good, which is the only thing a true musician cares about. There aren't many performers signed up that night, so we get to play four songs. We play a couple of Ralph Stanley numbers, a Doc Watson number, and, just for fun, a Who song, "Won't Get Fooled Again." Franklin is at the top of his game. He's even singing well. (I sing better, but I refuse to make him aware of it.) I play the part of the obedient backup musician. I use my violin to augment what he's doing. I sing harmony on some of the verses. Mainly I hang back and let him take center stage. I have never minded that. Violinists learn to do it over time. Women learn to do it long before that.

The secret to being a woman is hiding your smarts. You keep your mouth shut. You're patient. You wait. As far as I can tell, men and women are engaged in a kind of guerilla warfare. The first rule of guerilla warfare is that you use your enemy's weapons against him. If he lobs a bomb at you and it doesn't explode, you collect the bomb, fix it, and lob it back.

I decide not to lob any bombs this night, even though I could have done so in the form of some harrowing violin solo. I support his small and obvious goal because I have a bigger one in mind. I'm going to make him fall further in love with me. Then, when he's hooked, I'm going to tell him all about his obligation to get a real job with his MBA, and when he does, I'm going to be a professional musician.

Is this an evil plan or a good one? It's always so hard to tell. G.o.d and the devil wear each other's clothes.

In any case, when our set is over, we are the toast of the open mic. Several musicians come up to tell us how good we are. A young woman with bright red hair and an expensive guitar informs Franklin that she has a band and a manager, and they are looking for a great guitar player like him. Instead of saying, f.u.c.k off, I'm already in a duo, and I wouldn't even be here if it weren't for my violin player, he smiles and nods and writes his phone number down on a sc.r.a.p of paper. I stand off to the side and smile. I am waiting.

Franklin is practically drunk with praise by the time we leave. We are hungry and we walk down the street until we find a cheap Italian place that's still open. We order spaghetti and red wine, and I listen to him talk. He is full of talk, and I want to hear it all. I am patient.

He says, "Do you see? Do you see how they were responding to us?"

"They were responding to you," I tell him. "I didn't do much."

"Yeah, well, you're in the band. I can't do it without you."

"Of course you can."

"Well, I don't want to."

"Why not?"

He thinks about this while he's eating his pasta. He allows a little string of cheese to live on his lip for a second. I think about wiping it away. This is what women do for men all the time-prevent them from looking ridiculous. Finally he feels it and pulls it off, embarra.s.sed, trying to hide it. As if men are smart enough to hide anything.

He takes a sip of wine and says, "You really think I'm good enough?"

"I think you're too good," I tell him honestly.

"Too good for what?" he asks.

"I think you mean for who."

He raises an eyebrow. "You mean Jenny?"

"Is that her name? The redhead?"

"She's got a manager."

I push my plate away and lean over the table. I say, "Look, Franklin, you have talent, and everyone is in the business of stealing talent. You have to be able to recognize the thieves."

He hears this, then shakes his head. He's now overly involved with wiping his face off with his shredded paper napkin.

"Jenny's not like that," he tells me.

"Oh. And you know this because?"

"I'm instinctive about people," he informs me.

I laugh out loud. "The word is *intuitive,' and only women are intuitive."