Storms (5 page)

Lindsey began pointing everyone out to me. In the center of the table was a man whose presence was almost palpable. Blond and thickset, he held court while offering attention to all. His eyes were never still. I sensed that he was at the hub of this turning wheel.

“J.C.”, Lindsey whispered in my ear. “John Courage. Our road manager.” And then he said out loud, “This is Carol Ann. Say hello, John.”

“Well”, John drawled in an impeccable English voice, “who is this little flower?” He raised his eyebrows and his glass to me. I blushed. He winked. I was going to get on with J.C. He was an instant friend. He would remain a friend at all times.

“And”, Lindsey continued, his hand gripping mine under the table, his voice low, “there's Judy Wong, the band secretary”—tiny, Asian, black hair to her waist, and strikingly beautiful, she spoke animatedly, faster than anyone I'd ever seen, to the strong-boned, handsome woman beside her, a woman with a serene smile—” talking to Julie Ruebens, John's lady.”
John
, I thought,
should think himself lucky.
Julie oozed class and calm, warmth and wisdom. “And you know Richard.” Richard winked at me. “And next to him, that's Ken, our other engineer …” Ken was a nerdy kind of guy. Nice enough, though. “… and Ray, who looks after my guitars.” Ray seemed to want the table to open up and swallow him. He looked uncomfortable, as shy as I was. “And the heartbreaker over there is Curry Grant. Crazy name, huh?”

I could see what he meant. If I hadn't been hand-held and spellbound by Lindsey's breath on my neck, I may have succumbed. But he was a tad obvious despite his chestnut curls and his marron-glacé eyes. Not for me.

“He's Christine's—for now”, Lindsey laughed. I looked into his eyes. Mist blue did it for me, every time, over sickly nut browns. My glance told him I was not really impressed with the opposition.

“Where's Stevie?” I asked.

“Don't ask”, Lindsey murmured with his lopsided grin. “She kinda decided not to come.”

What exactly was he trying to say here?

“She's just going to have to get used to it. I haven't really seen anyone seriously since we broke up a year ago and, well, I guess she knows that I'm pretty serious about you.”

My breath stopped. Stevie Nicks was jealous of me? This was going to make things interesting. I held on to his hand and tried to concentrate on answering Christine's probing questions about my background, which were coming fast and furious. She wanted to know just about everything about me, and I answered her as best I could. I told her about Elbereth Enterprises, my record company, and the many bootleg records that I'd released with John, my “roommate.” I explained that we went to concerts—the Stones, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, the Faces, and others—and we recorded the show using a shotgun microphone and a tiny reel-to-reel Nagra recorder. We then mixed the tapes, designed the album covers, made “mother” acetates, and took them to a pressing plant. Our records were made from colored vinyl and we sold them via mail-order all over the world. And now I was training to be a recording engineer while working as studio manager. She nodded her head with each answer and looked meaningfully at Mick and John as Lindsey hung on my every word. What was she doing? Interviewing me? Had I got the job or not? And what exactly was the job?

“So …” Christine stared at me, piercingly. Everyone fell silent. “Have you bootlegged
Rumours
, Carol Ann?”

I flushed hideously. “No!” I managed to stammer. “Why … ?”

“Now that we know what your little sideline is, we wondered how safe we are from the bootleggers.” Without taking her eyes off me, she downed another large vodka in one swallow. John looked embarrassed but nodded. Lindsey was hanging on to my every word. I glanced at him. Yes, there was even doubt in
his
eyes.

I found myself boxed in, explaining that our music business wasn't that kind of bootlegging—we weren't “counterfeiters.” What we did wasn't illegal! And I would never, ever, copy tapes from work. My voice was fogging with tears, but Lindsey squeezed my hand.

“S'OK, Carol Ann”, Christine said, suddenly laughing uproariously. “Just testing! We all thought the air ought to be cleared over a couple of nagging doubts before we gave you the seal of approval.”

“Approval?” I asked, disbelieving what I'd just heard.

“We needed to know, see, if you're going to be one of us. I was voted Woman Most Likely to Uncover Hidden Motives. But you really don't have any, do you? OK, Lindsey, back to you now. I'm just going to the little girls' room!”

“You did great!” Lindsey whispered to me as she staggered away.

“But …”

“It's OK, forget it. This is Fleetwood Mac, you know, and we have to be careful. Christine volunteered to sound you out. And you passed the test. Now just relax and try to enjoy yourself.”

I was speechless. I'd been subjected to an interrogation there, and everyone, even the guy I was falling for, had ganged up on me. It felt like I'd just taken an entrance exam for La Cosa Nostra.

What was this I was getting into? Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the restlessness in the room as the gourmet food was presented—and ignored. People moved in and out of the bathrooms at frightening speed, even as I was talking to them. I was completely unaware, in my innocence, that everyone but Judy was taking cocaine breaks.

There were toasts to the album and war stories about the past year they had spent creating it. The noise level and pitch at our table was getting louder and higher with each trip to the bathroom, and the jokes cruder. I felt like an outsider and an intruder more than a participating member of this exclusive, crazed group of people. When Mick got out of his chair for the fourth or fifth time and almost fell over his own feet, Lindsey asked me if I was ready to leave. I smiled with relief and grabbed my purse and coat as Lindsey made our goodbyes. My first Fleetwood Mac party was over—and my first fears had surfaced.

We left clinging to each other like the drowning to driftwood, sheltering in his car from the rain, curling into each other's warm spaces. I belonged
in this world I'd found in Lindsey's arms and nothing else mattered. It was 3:30
A.M.
when reality came crashing back.

“My God, Lindsey, I have to go! He'll think I've been in a car accident!” Lindsey scowled at my reference to John, and pulled me back down to the depths.

“Carol Ann, I think I'm falling in love with you.”

I was stunned. I never knew it was possible to feel as happy as I did that moment. At the same time, a voice in my head whispered
Is he telling me this now because I passed some secret rite of passage during dinner?
As I stared into his eyes, gazing into the clear blue, I knew that the band had given me their seal of approval and Lindsey was now free to tell me how he felt about me. Thrill, then terror. I couldn't. But I would. I knew I would.

“I'm so happy, Lindsey”, I murmured into the cloud of his soft, damp hair.

And then I got into my car to drive home through the deserted streets, as he stood cast adrift, waving me goodbye. I turned the radio on for company, pushed a button blindly on the console, and the guitar riff from “Go Your Own Way” blasted out from my small speakers. I'd only heard it in the studio, never, ever on the radio. I hit the brakes hard, almost fishtailing on the wet pavement. I sat in the middle of the street, rain still falling, and listened to Lindsey's voice, a man committed. One phrase repeated itself in my mind as I listened:
The man who's singing this song is the man who just told me he's falling in love with me.

The rest of the drive home was a blur.

I walked through the front door of my condo at 4:30
A.M.
The house was dark, a tomb. I saw a flashing red light coming from the answering machine and, thinking that Lindsey had called me while I was driving home, I rushed to it and pushed the play button.

“Carol Ann, Carol, dear, where are you?”

My mother. My mother had never before left a message for me on an answering machine, and had rarely called at night. With a true mother's instinct she must have sensed that I was entering an unknown world, a sleeping child's world of giants and monsters with a handsome prince to save me, if he could. To this day I don't know how she knew—but she did. She told me how much she missed me, how much she hated the fact that I was so far away from her, and she talked for ten minutes about all the things that millions of mothers tell their children.

He'll be good to me, Mama, you'll see
, I told her in my heart, hoping, almost certain, that it was true.

My mother was wonderful. In my eyes, she was the best mother in the entire world. She'd devoted her life to my six sisters and me. She was a brilliant woman with gorgeous red hair who was always laughing, always busy, and always taking care of her girls. She didn't know how to drive a car, but she wrote poetry and short stories, was a gifted artist, and instilled a love of books in all of her daughters. In the Harris family, the public library was like a second home and at any given time you could find one or all us curled up with a book, lost in yet another story.

My father was a Tulsa city engineer who had a second career as a substitute math teacher—raising a family of seven girls was an expensive proposition. He was a gentle man who bore a striking resemblance to Clark Gable and I adored him. My parents had their family in stages. My oldest sisters, Margaret, Tommie, and Patsy, were all born more than ten years before me. Sue came next, and Dana, Jeannie, and I followed more than four years later.

It was nonstop chaos in a home that was ruled by two parents who used humor and love as their tools of discipline. We were never yelled at, never spanked, and while I'm sure we were a handful, none of us gave them much grief. My older sisters had all gone to college and had their degrees, but I had chosen to move to L.A. with Lori instead. I'd always felt that remaining in Tulsa was not my destiny, always felt that there was a different future meant for me. As I sat in the dark replaying my mother's message, I suddenly felt as though I was racing toward it.

I'd been tearing myself apart with guilt over John, but when the end came it was almost comic relief. At least that's how it feels when I look back on the morning of slammed doors and shrieking curses. He was on the rampage downstairs. I was still in bed, reliving every snatched moment with Lindsey, every whispered phone call, every opportunity to ask each other “How was your day?”

This day didn't sound too good from John's perspective.

I slipped quietly out of bed and into my ripped blue jeans and a man's red corduroy shirt.
You can do this, Carol
, I told myself.
Just stop living a lie, will you, girl?
I squared my shoulders, took a deep breath, and walked slowly
down the staircase. John was perched on a bar stool next to our answering machine, red-faced, ready for nuclear war.

“Sit down, Carol! Sit and listen to what I have to play for you.”

He pushed the button residentially, smirking already at the prospect of fallout. On the answering machine I heard myself talking to Lindsey. It was the conversation we'd had when he invited me to the Fleetwood Mac dinner. As soon as I heard his voice, I smiled involuntarily. John caught the smile. It pushed him over the edge.

“You're seeing him! Don't deny it! I caught you! I can smell him on your clothes when you come home from work!”

I froze. Taping my calls was bad enough, but smelling my clothes? So gross!
Well, that does it
, I thought, as I took two steps away from him. “First of all, that's really freaky, John, but whatever.” And then I told him. I told him about Lindsey, told him I'd fallen in love, told him that I was leaving, and I told him calmly and clearly. It was such a relief. I felt strong—strong enough to use all the words I'd been running through my head for weeks now. It was easy.

“Look, you don't love me. You're just used to me. You didn't want our baby, and you didn't want to marry me when I needed you the most. I haven't slept with Lindsey. And you didn't have to go through that stupid detective act. You know what you could have done? You could have asked. But we never talked about anything, did we? We didn't even care enough to talk.”

And then I left, went upstairs, and phoned Lindsey.

“He's been doing
what?
Is he completely
nuts?
Do you want me to come get you? I want you out of that house and here with me. Now!” he yelled.

“Lindsey, John would never hurt me and besides, I'm leaving right now. But if there's any trouble, I'll call you again. I'll see you in about forty-five minutes. If I'm not there in an hour, here's my address.” I hung up the phone and with my purse, a change of clothes, toothbrush, and car keys in hand, I walked out of the life I'd been living for the past five years.

Lindsey was sitting on his front stairs waiting for me and sprinted toward my car as I pulled into his driveway. He swept me into his arms and swung me off my feet, kissing me over and over again. Neither one of us said a word. We stood and looked at each other, sharing the wonder of the
first blue sky of winter, and he led me by the hand into his small one-story house. I was washed clean of the past.

My first day as Lindsey's girlfriend was about to begin. I was free. I was in love. I had a job that fascinated me and pushed me hard. I'd never felt so alive, ever. Alive and in control for the first time.

Lindsey and I went to a deli for breakfast and sat just looking at each other in giggling amazement.

“Shit!” he said suddenly. “I'm flying to Aspen tomorrow on a ski trip with Mick and Richard. I'll get out of it. I won't go.”

I reached over and touched his cheek. “Hey, I'm a big girl, you know! I'm going to find an apartment just for me! It's an adventure—it's been years since I had one of those!”