My Heart

And So Became Your Face

Santa Monica, California
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
(3:00 am)
********************

It's a good thing that dog is losing her eyesight because even she would be ashamed of me if she saw what I am about to do.

Stevie sat alone on the end of her bed, feet dangling above the Persian rug, looking at her tiny old dog fast asleep in a leopard printed dog bed in the corner. Sulamith usually slept in bed with her, but Karen had carried the dog up to the bedroom before she'd gone home for the night, and Stevie watched her tiny hairless form rising and falling in her little cashmere sweater, tucked away in a little ball as she slept, thinking of Ginny the poodle and how her favorite place to sleep back in the day had been on Lindsey's chest. She used to walk in on Lindsey sprawled out on the mattress beside his guitar with Ginny draped across his chest, and their inside joke would ensue when she'd crawl into bed next to him and say, "Like mother like daughter." Her favorite place to sleep was on Lindsey's chest just like the dog. It was there, curled up against him with his arms wrapped around her, his heart beating beneath her cheek, where she'd always felt the most safe, the most at home.

She thought back to the last time she was there, in the early morning hours when they'd finally fallen asleep in her hotel room bed in San Jose. The sun was not quite coming up yet outside the window, and there was a soft purple glow in the room as she'd pulled the covers all the way up over her naked body, ever the modest Stevie everyone knew, and had just closed her eyes when she'd felt Lindsey's hand on her bare shoulder, his fingertips gliding softly along the nape of her neck followed by his lips there in a kiss that made a little sound that broke the deafening silence in the room after hours of moans and whimpers and fervent whispers of things they'd always said to each other when they were entwined in the darkness.

"You're too far away, sweet girl," he'd whispered into her hair before placing a kiss on her shoulder. He was turning her around to face him, and for a moment she was afraid he'd see the tears that had come to her eyes at the realization that it was not just the sex he'd wanted, but for her to fall asleep in his arms like she used to. She quickly used the edge of the sheet to wipe her tears away before settling into her favorite place on earth, her home...Lindsey's arms. She caught herself just a split second before saying I love you before closing her eyes.

She was asleep almost immediately, finally warm enough for the first time in twelve years.

Lindsey smiled as he passed by the heavy, ornate gold frame around the painted portrait of silent film star Mabel Normand. Mabel, like Stevie, had suffered from cocaine addiction, and Lindsey remembered her telling him while they were making Tango In The Night that she'd watched a documentary about her on PBS one night while cutting lines by herself around the coffee table and snorting one after the other, and then written a song about it.

"I know my Mabel Normand song isn't right for this album; don't worry," she'd said in his bedroom recording studio one day in a white and gold t-shirt dress that was very 1986-fabulous and made her look like a delicious vanilla ice cream. "I'll save it for one of mine...maybe, like, a compilation album of all the songs that just weren't the right vibe for anything else."

Lindsey took a deep breath when he got to Stevie's bedroom door, Mabel Normand's haunting expression of fake happiness and quiet desperation staring him down. He thought of the night he'd found out Ginny the dog had died, and the white roses he'd sent to Stevie for the loss of the little white dog who used to love to sleep on his chest. "Like mother like daughter," Stevie would always say. Attached to the flowers he'd enclosed a card that read From sleeping on top of me to running free through the clouds, I will always love you, Jennifer Nicks. I am so sorry. Love, Lindsey.