Sweet Sixteen, Chapter 4 ~ Damn Fine, part 2

Contentment had once been a foreign word to Russell Markson.  Foreign in any language he’d ever heard it in.

It was what he had always wanted, though, wanted more than he wanted adventure and new experiences.  Every new thing was just a search for something to be content with.  He rarely thought about these things, in so many words, but by the time he turned thirty-nine he had come close to achieving them, and was as happy with his life as he’d ever been.

He was in a successful band, which allowed him to travel abroad while staying in the world where the people he loved lived.  And that was another thing; he had people to love.  Russ had been married for seventeen years but the fact still surprised him, as if he was going to come home one day and find the house empty and realize he’d just imagined up Liseli, the kids, his life.

Russ had never expected to be in this position, when he was younger.

He’d spent his childhood and teenaged years watching other people with a forlorn loneliness that came of knowing they had an ability he didn’t, the ability to reach out to each other because they didn’t have the debilitating worry of being shoved rudely away.  Other kids moved together, in their little social circles, grouping together, coupling, because they wanted and were wanted.  He just wanted.

At least that’s how he’d felt back then.  Liseli told him that obviously he’d just been too shy to poke his head out of his shell far enough for anyone to notice him.  He insisted that he’d tried to make friends, ask girls out on dates.  Once or twice.

She’d written his experiences off with her own.  “I didn’t have many friends in school either but that’s because I didn’t want any, I was unsociable.  No one makes friends or gets dates without trying.”

“I’m sociable.”

“No you’re not.  I know you, Russ.  You’re impossible.”

Well, maybe she was right.  Maybe he’d defeated himself with shyness, maybe he’d just not liked anyone enough to go out of his way to get to know them and let them get to know him.  But he was sure that if anyone had tried to draw him out of his shell he wouldn’t have fought them.

It didn’t really matter and he knew that life was long past, more than 20 years in the past, but he was still constantly surprised by the friends and family he had.

And if that weren’t enough, he had fans.  Well, Ixion had fans.

Noah had the most, of course; he was the singer, they always had the most fans.  Sam was the most popular with the groupies because he was the most willing.  But still, fans praised him for the way he played guitar, and liked to inform that he was hot.  (He doubted this, but was gratified that there were people out there who thought so.)

His kids were nothing like he had been, and that made him proud.  His sons and daughters hadn’t grown up neglected and made to feel worthless, so they didn’t suffer from any of the shyness or fear he had.  He was proud of them not only because they represented his triumph over his family and past, but because he really thought they were some of the smartest, most well-adjusted, best looking kids around.

Liseli often complained that they were just like him, for one reason or another, but he didn’t know what she was talking about.  She hadn’t known him in high school.  She’d somehow gotten the idea that he was brazen, when she met him.

“You’d stare at me, all day, as if you were imagining me without my clothes on.”

“I did not.”

“Did too.  You were dripping in barely concealed lust.”

She said it playfully, and he thought she was exaggerating.  He’d never been obvious about his interest in her when they first met.  He had thought about her constantly, with or without clothes, since the first time he’d seen her, but he’d never said anything.  He’d never done anything forward.  And he didn’t think he’d stared at her openly.

Liseli continued to say and think things that puzzled him.  He thought that, by now, he should know her better than anyone else, but she could still say things that were a mystery.  Mostly it was when she was talking about him.  She did not see him the way he saw himself.  Maybe that was why she thought the kids were like him, when they were so obviously different.

Elly was her mother all over again.  She had his tallness, his hazel eyes, but her mother’s hair and personality.  The older she got the more like Liseli she became.  Liseli thought the opposite — that she was Daddy’s Little Girl, and always would be.

Marcus and Eric did look like him, very much like him, as if none of their mother’s physical genes had made it to them.  But Russ thought they’d inherited all of Liseli’s stubborn, mule-like personality.  They were fearless, Marcus always getting in trouble for starting or finishing one fight or another because he thought he could take on the world.  He wanted to be a boxer, which horrified Liseli.

Eric was too agreeable to get into lots of fights, he made friends more easily than anyone Russ had ever seen.  He got into the usual tussles with friends, but it was never serious.  He was never afraid, like Russ always was, that people wouldn’t like him or accept him.  He had no reason to; and somehow even though he looked so much like Russ had at fourteen, he made his hazel eyes, lopsided smile, and tousled black curls into something that attracted girls to him like flies.

Eric took them for granted, just like he took it for granted that his broken bones and gashes healed faster than anyone else the doctors said they’d ever seen.  In his short fourteen year career Eric had broken, cut, and mashed more parts of his body than most people twice his age.  It didn’t faze him, because he healed fast, and anyway, scars were cool and girls liked to write on his casts.

Sometimes Liseli complained that Russ was spending all his money on “neck breaking” toys for Eric, but if Eric said he needed money for the latest innovation in dirt bike engines, Russ didn’t see why his son should be riding old technology.  He was a rock star, after all.  He had money.

Little Hollie was the quietest of the children.  Maybe she was like him, then.  But it wasn’t the same sort of quietness, she was quiet because she didn’t feel like she had to be loud, not because she was afraid to be.  She was a bright child who did well in school, she had thick curly black hair like his, but eyes that were every bit as sharp and green as her mother’s.  One look into her eyes assured him that she was not quiet because she was shy.  In fact, Hollie often looked as if she were lurking.

Russ had one more reason to feel lucky.  The years hadn’t done their usual work on him.  He still had all his hair, just as thick and dark as it had ever been, and his face was “boyish,” as people said, and unwrinkled.  He kept in good shape easily, and though he was the oldest member of the band, no one would guess it.

Russ tried not to dwell on this very often, he was only thirty-nine and that wasn’t very old, he wasn’t ready to start thinking about old age or peering at himself in the mirror to see how dilapidated he was getting.  (Or not getting.)  But people razzed him about it sometimes, most often the guys in the band who were jealous because their rock ‘n’ roll lifestyles were making them look older in their late twenties and early thirties than he did at nearly forty.  He just laughed them off and said that clean living was good for something, after all.

Russ disliked one thing about his rock career, and that was the press.  They were forever pestering him for interviews, and he didn’t see why it was necessary, because Noah loved nothing more than to talk, and Sam and Jake weren’t too shy either.  Russ and Wes preferred to do their job and do it well, without the fanfare of photo ops and interviews.  Even so, some people just didn’t get the message that Russ didn’t do interviews.  He was glad to be the quiet, mysterious one.  He tired of people who wanted to do a deep, telling expose on the “real Russ Markson.”  His family and close friends knew the real Russ Markson, and as far as he was concerned, they were the only ones who needed to.

The other guys in the band, the attention loving ones at least, liked to tell stories about him.  Jake, especially, enjoyed misleading befuddled people into believing that he and Russ were about the same age and had grown up together as boys, and he told wild stories of things that they had supposedly done, which had never happened.  The music press and casual fans lapped that stuff up.  Only true die-hards and reporters who bothered to do research realized that Russ was thirteen years older than Jake, and had not actually met his half-brother until they were twenty-eight and fifteen, respectively.

Russ didn’t much care what stories his bandmates told about him, unless it made Liseli upset.  And they pretty much knew not to tell stories that would make Liseli upset.  When Liseli was not happy, no one was happy.

Russ had once realized something about Liseli, that had, at the time, come as a great revelation.  She did not like to work.  In fact, she hated it.

For a long time Russ had thought that Liseli loved to work, because she’d always thrown herself into any job she had.  When he first met her she’d been grinding herself into a job that few people around her even went at half-ass.  She’d often voiced her hatred of that job (which, in retrospect, wasn’t the best thing for a manager to say, but that was Liseli) but he’d thought it was that job in particular; that place, those co-workers.  And to a certain extent it was, but she really did hate the workplace in general.  He was sure of that now.  Because now Liseli didn’t go to work, any work, and ever since she’d stopped she’d become a much easier person to live with.

In the early years of their marriage, Liseli had always had some sort of office job.  She had an English degree she’d worked hard to earn, but so far as he could tell an English degree was good for exactly nothing.  An English degree was useful if you wanted to teach the stuff, but teaching jobs did not pay enough.  Russ doubted teaching would make Liseli very happy, either.  He could imagine her terrorizing her students into submission, certainly, but Liseli lacked a certain amount of . . . patience . . . needed to teach.  Of course he loved her exactly the way she was, but . . . .

At any rate, once Ixion had finally started to rake in some money Liseli had stopped working to devote more time to her children.  Liseli had five children, as Russ saw it — the kids and her writing projects.  She had, recently, been able to get a couple books published.  Nothing ended up on the New York Times bestseller list, or anything grand like that, but that didn’t worry Liseli too much.  She’d always been shy about her writing, or at least, Russ saw it that way.  What mattered more to her than commercial success, was having time and energy to write for herself.

He expected she must have written enough material for ten great American novels by now, but he’d only ever been allowed to look at the stuff she was trying to get published.  Those works were aggressively literary and slice-of-life, nothing remotely magical or otherworldly about them.  Nothing that reflected the experiences they’d been through.  He wondered what she was writing that never saw the light of day; she was probably writing uncomplimentary things about him . . . .

But, it made her happy.  No matter how shy and private she was about it, if she had the leisure to sit at her computer tapping away, she was much happier than when she had to go to work.  Anything that would make Liseli happy, Russ did for her.

He thought to himself that he’d finally fallen into the right groove.  He’d been in different sorts of ruts before, but this was a proper, satisfying, groove.  Someday in the future he might itch again to see what was on the other side of Gates no one else saw, but for now travelling around one world keep him content enough.

His kids were getting older, but they didn’t give him ulcers like other teenagers gave their fathers, they were the best kids he could have hoped for.  He didn’t look too far into the future, because there was nothing worrisome in it, and the present was damn fine.