My Heart

And You Understand

Santa Monica, California
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
(2:00 am)
********************

"I swear to God, Linds, on the life of my poor little old dog who can't see...I swear I had no idea he was going to read it all!"

Stevie had caught a case of the giggles, and Lindsey had not exhaled properly in a good ten minutes because she was so adorable. She had been filling him in on how the album had come about, why they'd chosen the title In Your Dreams, and how Dave had read the book of her poetry she'd had bound for him from cover to cover. At first he'd felt the pang of jealousy in his gut that had been plaguing him on and off all evening, but as Stevie's story had worn on, he'd all but forgotten to be jealous of Dave because his entire soul was invested in Stevie's sheer excitement about the project, in the usual way she wove a tale - with several detours and extraneous details peppered throughout that were clever and adorable - and in the way her laughter made his heart do jumping jacks every bit as much as her dazzling smile in the light of the fire that roared on beside them in the fireplace. He was starting to remember that this was exactly how their night together in San Jose had gotten out of hand, and he didn't know what was making him more ashamed of himself - the fact that he was not putting a stop to it, or the fact that he didn't want to.

"I don't see why you think that's such a strange thing, Stevie," he said, knowing he was grinning like an idiot but totally incapable of stopping. "Your poems are beautiful."

"Sure, but Jesus Christ, Lindsey, I have eyes and ears, you know! I get that people think I'm verbose and long-winded and all...and that's just when I talk!" She laughed again, but this time he noticed a sharp change in the tone of her laughter. It was almost too self-deprecating, almost defeatist.

"Your poems have given you all of this," Lindsey insisted, spreading his arms wide and looking all around to indicate the enormous home in which they sat, surrounded by expensive furnishings and almost too many antiques, not to mention tens of thousands of dollars worth of recording equipment. "Don't knock your poetry, Stevie. I never have."

Stevie stared him down as she set her glass of wine down on the coffee table and then folded her arms across her chest. "Seriously?"

"What?" Lindsey swallowed his generous sip of wine hard. Looking at her expression, he realized she was being serious now.

"You never knocked my poetry?" She shook her head and said, in her best imitation of his know-it-all tone, 'It's a rule of thumb in writing that you don't change your tense or your person...'" Her arms still folded up tight, she cocked her head to one side, still looking at him. Lindsey realized she was referring to the day she'd come to him with "Thrown Down" when they were making Say You Will and he'd suggested a change in tense and pronoun in one of the verses while, off in the distance, a camera crew recording the conversation for the documentary Destiny Rules had captured on film the look of indignation in her eyes as she'd sat slumped on the sofa but with unwavering confidence in her work.

"Okay." He turned inward toward her, his hand inadvertently dropping to her knee on the sofa before him. "You got me. I was a jackass that day...and I'm sorry." His eyes met here, and sensing the need to lighten the mood, he added, "And you were right - I would not say that to Bob Dylan."

That was all Stevie needed to dissolve into giggles again, and this time Lindsey laughed along, the two of them leaning in against each other, their hands meeting in between their two laps. All was forgiven...at least as far as "Thrown Down" was concerned.

"Soldier's Angel" was all worked out. Stevie had opened the wine shortly after Lori had taken her phone call to Barbara upstairs to the guest room she'd been occupying since flying in from Phoenix to make the album, and Lindsey had begun to pick around at chords. One by one, everyone else had gone home or upstairs to bed, and four hours and another bottle of 1961 Lafitte Rothschild later, Stevie and Lindsey had agreed on the guitar parts of the song and were ready for Dave to hear it all together the following afternoon, and the conversation had turned to frivolous personal matters. Stevie had caught Lindsey up, upon his request, on how Barbara was doing with her chronic lung illnesses and her life without Jess, how she worried because Barbara moved slower these days and had oxygen tanks in her home to combat COPD after a lifetime of smoking cigarettes. Lindsey had opened his new iPhone Camera Roll app and flashed pictures of Will on the baseball field, LeeLee on horseback, Stella splashing in the pool.