Slide Lesson

Three months ago I was still living near the coast, teaching swim lessons at the Y in Cannon Beach, smelling like chlorine six days a week. Now I live in Portland in a drafty bungalow with a converted garage out back, and I spend my evenings holding a glass bottleneck against a resonator guitar and making noises that would embarrass a dying cat.

Stanley says I'm coming along. Stanley is generous like that. He married me fourteen years ago, back when I was twenty-eight and he was drumming sessions at a jazz club downtown, and he has spent those fourteen years being kind about my musical ability the same way he's kind about my cooking: he eats it all and says it's great and quietly adds more salt.

I'm forty-two now. I wanted to learn slide guitar for one reason. His blues band has a gig coming up at the Alberta Street Pub in six weeks, and there's an open spot in the middle of the set where he's always talked about wanting a second guitar, someone just playing long slow slides under the vocals. He never asked me. I decided I would surprise him.

So that's how I ended up in the garage studio on a Tuesday night, sitting on a worn Persian rug with a steel-bodied resonator across my lap, while my husband knelt behind me and rearranged my fingers like I was a mannequin he hadn't finished assembling.

The garage was cluttered the way it always is. Amps stacked in the corner, mic stands leaning against each other like drunks, a milk crate of cables nobody had untangled since we moved in. The only light came from the red lava lamp on the shelf and the little amber glow of his old Fender, so everything looked warm and slightly underwater. I liked that. Water I understood. Music I was still learning to swim in.

"Loosen up," Stanley said, and I felt his breath at my ear more than heard him. "Your whole forearm is locked. You're strangling the neck."

"It feels weird. The bar thing keeps sliding off."

"It's supposed to slide. That is the entire point. Feel the string, not the glass."

He had said that three times already and it still sounded like fortune cookie nonsense to me. But he reached around from behind and put his fingers over mine, and I let him move them where he wanted. His chest was against my back. He wasn't a big man but he was solid, drummer solid, forearms like rope, and the warmth of him through my tank top was doing more to loosen me up than any breathing exercise.

He had taken the glass slide off his own ring finger and slid it onto mine, and it hung there loose and cool, and he said that was right, it should be sloppy, you don't grip it, you wear it. Then he laid his hand over the back of mine and drew the whole thing, glass and fingers and all, down the neck in one slow pass. The note bloomed and slid and faded, one long moan out of the resonator.

"There," he said. "Hear that? That's the sound. You don't push. You rest."

I rested. It sounded less terrible.

"Again," he said, and his hand stayed on mine, and we did it again, and then again, and each time the note came out smoother and each time I was less aware of the guitar and more aware of the fact that his thumb was moving in a small slow circle on the back of my hand, and that his chin had come to rest on my shoulder.

Let me say here that I have been married to this man a long time, and I know what it means when Stanley stops watching my hands and starts breathing slower. I wasn't oblivious. I was forty-two years old, three months out of a town where my biggest social event was the Y staff potluck, and my husband of fourteen years was curled against my back in a red-lit room with his hands on me. My blood knew exactly what was happening even if my brain was still trying to finish the barre chord.

"OK," he said. "Posture now. This is the part everybody gets wrong."

"Is it the part where you tell me to sit up straight again?"

"It is not." He shifted behind me, and I heard him smile, that little exhale through the nose he does. "The vibration comes from your body, not the guitar. The guitar is just the box it comes out of. You're sitting on the resonance. You have to let it into your hips, your back. Feel it here."

And he lifted the hem of my tank top, just on one side, and laid his palm flat against my bare hip.

I stopped breathing for a second. His hand was warm and rough, drum calluses and all, and it sat there on my skin like it belonged there, which after fourteen years it did, but not usually during a guitar lesson. The resonator hummed against my thigh from the last note, some low dying thing, and his hand was on my hip, and the lava lamp made a slow glug sound like it was commenting.

"Feel that?" he said, quieter now. "Where the resonance lives. Right here."

"I feel it," I said. My voice came out lower than I intended.

"Good."

He didn't move his hand. He pressed a little firmer, and I swear I could feel the low E string through the body of the guitar and through his palm and into my hip bone, all of it one thing. He struck the string with the flat of his thumb near the soundhole, and the note rolled through the steel and through my lap and through his hand into me, and I understood in one long second what he'd been trying to tell me all night. Feel the string, not the glass. Let it in.

I did it myself then, slow slide up the neck, and the note wavered and sang, and Stanley made a small approving sound against my shoulder and his thumb traced up from my hip along the waistband of my leggings, just a little, just to the edge of where my side meets my stomach, and stopped there. Asking. He has always asked, even after all these years, even when the answer is obvious, especially then.

I put the guitar down. I leaned it gently against the amp stand, careful with it even with my heart going hard, and I reached back and put my hand over his where it rested on my skin.

"Lesson over?" he asked, against my ear.

"Not even close," I said. "But I'm done holding the guitar."

He kissed the side of my neck then, slow, and I felt the whole garage get smaller, the red light and the rug and the two of us and the low hum the resonator was still letting out, like it knew it was off duty.

"You sure?" he said.

"Stanley. I have been sure since you put the glass on my finger."

He turned me around to face him, slow, like turning a page. His hands went to the snap of my jeans and he paused there, one finger hooked under the waistband, waiting. I nodded. That was all he needed. He unsnapped them, drew the zipper down tooth by tooth, and I heard my own breath change.

"This is just another kind of fretwork," he murmured, and his hand slid down into my panties.

I laughed, or tried to, and it came out as something else. His fingers found me and I was already wet, so wet it embarrassed me for half a second until I remembered this was Stanley, who had seen me postpartum and pre-coffee and in a hospital gown, and embarrassment didn't live here anymore. He pressed two fingers flat against me, not inside, just resting, and I pushed my hips forward without deciding to.

"Oh," I said. "OK. Yeah."

"There's my lesson," he said, and he kissed me while his fingers moved, small slow circles that made the fretboard analogy hold up better than it should have. I gripped the front of his shirt. Somewhere behind us the resonator gave one last sympathetic hum off a passing truck outside, and I remember thinking that was funny, the room still playing itself, and then I stopped thinking in complete sentences for a while.

He walked me backward to the couch in the corner, the one we'd hauled in there years ago for exactly this purpose and never admitted it. It smelled like dust and old foam. He sat me down and knelt to pull my jeans off, and I lifted my hips for him, and he took the panties with them, and the air on my skin was cool and then his mouth was not cool at all. He took his time. He always