Lonesome Lies Before Us

by Don Lee

  3. Tell It to the Angels 4:09

  Yadin and Jeanette stood with the three other members of the choir at the front of the sanctuary, flanked by the pianist, Siobhan, and the music director, Darnell. None of them wore robes for this morning’s service, although Yadin had on his Sunday best—a white button-down shirt and khaki pants—and Jeanette was in an equally conservative blouse and skirt. Nearly everyone in the congregation, however, was dressed more casually, many in jeans, some even in T-shirts.

  With the others in the choir, Yadin and Jeanette sang:

  Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving

  It doesn’t matter

  Ours is not a caravan of despair

  Come, even if you have broken your vow

  a thousand times

  Come, yet again, come, come

  Yadin never envied Darnell’s job, having to find hymns like this one, based on a poem by Rumi, that weren’t overtly religious. Darnell made most of his selections from a hymnal called Singing the Living Tradition, but sometimes he resorted to old pop tunes like “Lean on Me” and “All You Need Is Love.”

  Before coming here, Yadin had only been in churches for the occasional funeral or wedding. His mother had been a nonpracticing Jew, his father nothing, as far as Yadin ever knew. He grew up not thinking about religion at all, and this had continued throughout his adulthood, although as he was lurching through the worst of his afflictions, he had sometimes found himself praying. Please, God, don’t let me suffer anymore. Please, God, help me. Save me.

  When he had started working for Wall to Wall, he ran into Jeanette sporadically in the office, and Joe told his daughter, offhand, that Yadin had once been a singer of some sort. Thereafter, Jeanette kept asking him to join the choir at her church, which he resisted for months (“I’m not a believer,” he would tell her. “You don’t have to be,” she would tell him, adding, “I’m a devout atheist,” baffling him no end), until he realized that she might be using the invitation as a pretext to see him more. He decided to attend a service, reluctant as he was about encountering unfamiliar ecclesiastical rituals.

  He needn’t have worried. Unitarian Universalism was a liberal, progressive faith. It welcomed anyone, from Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists to agnostics, pantheists, pagans, and atheists. Although some congregations flirted with UU’s Protestant roots, the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Rosarita Bay was staunchly humanist. It was as unreligious as a church could get. Often, an entire service could pass without the mention of God or any other deity.

  Singing in the choir was another matter. It was distressing enough auditioning for Darnell. How would Yadin do in front of a weekly audience? He had never, in his entire life, performed sober in public. He wouldn’t be able to wear sunglasses or a hat. He had shaved off his beard. There would be nowhere to hide, no avenue of escape. No amount of experience had ever diminished his fear of singing live, regardless of the circumstances.

  But his nerves were allayed by the knowledge that these were not his songs they would be singing, and he would be among a group of amateurs, and the congregation would be small, twenty-five, thirty people at most, consisting largely of graying ex-hippies, tree huggers, and earth-mother flakes. They were a mellow, geriatric flock, hardly judgmental. The average age at the church was almost sixty.

  He could relax in this environment, and it turned out that being in the choir gave him pleasure. Jeanette had a nice soprano, and the other members could more than hold their own. They worked well together. Yadin had forgotten, after being away from music for so long, what it was like to be part of a musical group.

  He had joined his first garage band in eighth grade, then had belonged to a real band in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he had gone after dropping out of high school, then had had backing bands in studios and on the road. With those bands, he had found fraternity. He had been an oddball, a freak, but the musicians in those bands had all been freaks. In this choir, in this church, Yadin discovered a similar form of kinship. It provided him with comfort and safety, and taught him to be more social, less anxious, around people.

  When they finished singing the hymn, their minister, Franklin, risking the appearance of bourgeois conformity by wearing a stole, stepped up to the pulpit—or, rather, a lectern. Their church was in a building that was formerly a day-care center. The sanctuary was a fluorescent-lit room with drop-ceiling tiles, and they had stackable chairs instead of pews.

  “And now, if you’re comfortable,” Franklin said, “please remain standing for today’s call and response.”

  They looked down at their programs.

  “We need—” a child burst out.

  Everyone laughed gently. It was Rebecca, Franklin’s five-year-old daughter, in the front row. Franklin’s wife, Caroline Storli, whispered to Rebecca, “Not yet, honey,” and nodded to her husband.

  Caroline was tall and very thin, with long black hair, and was dressed in a gray sweater with a cowl neck and black slacks. A monochromatic, seemingly prim outfit. Yet when she bent down to speak to her daughter, Yadin caught a glimpse of her bra, and was a little taken aback to see that it was flame-red, lacy, and semitransparent.

  “We need one another when we mourn and would be comforted,” Franklin called.

  “We need one another when we are in trouble and afraid,” they responded.

  “We need one another when we are in despair, in temptation, and need to be recalled to our best selves again.”

  “We need one another when we would accomplish some great purpose, and cannot do it alone.”

  “We need one another in the hour of success, when we look for someone to share our triumphs.”

  “We need one another in the hour of defeat, when with encouragement we might endure, and stand again.”

  “We need one another when we come to die, and would have gentle hands prepare us for the journey.”

  “All our lives we are in need, and others are in need of us.”

  “Please be seated,” Franklin told them.

  Yadin and Jeanette glanced at each other briefly, and smiled.

  Theirs had been a slow courtship. Neither had dated for many years, and it took over six months before they saw each other outside of choir rehearsals and church activities. Finally Joe invited Yadin to his house for Thanksgiving with the family, and again for Christmas. On New Year’s Eve, Jea nette had Yadin over to her bungalow, and they watched half of a British romantic comedy on DVD, switched to the Times Square festivities on television (tape-delayed three hours), and kissed for the first time at midnight. She was a little tipsy. She had opened a bottle of champagne and, since Yadin didn’t drink, had finished almost all of it herself. She said, “I like you a lot, Yadin. Do you like me?”

  “Yes,” he told her. “I do.”

  “I think we could be good together—good for each other.”

  “I feel the same.”

  “But there’s something you should know,” she said. “I’m not a very sexual person. How do you feel about that?”

  “What do you mean, not a sexual person?” he asked.

  “I’m not frigid or a prude,” she said. “I just don’t have much of a sex drive these days. Would that bother you? I mean, of course it would. But how important is that to you in a relationship?”

  “Not very much. It wouldn’t be a big deal to me,” he told her.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Jeanette, I’m not a kid anymore.”

  It would be another two months before they had sex, yet from that early morning on New Year’s Day, two and a half years ago, it had been understood that they were a couple.

  After church, they usually drove to San Vicente to pick up a week’s worth of groceries and a tank of gas at Costco, occa sionally stopping at Target or—reluctantly, given the poor treatment of its workers—Walmart when it didn’t make sense to purchase items in Costco’s bulk sizes.

  Today, as on many Sundays, coming back up the hill toward Rosarita Bay after their s
hopping, they got trapped in traffic on Highway 71—possibly an accident, construction, a breakdown, anything on the winding road could cause gridlock. Jeanette was driving them in her 1999 Honda Civic. They had left Yadin’s van, which was even older and in dubious shape, in the church parking lot.

  “I put your meats with the frozen foods in the cooler,” Yadin told her. “They should keep.” He had forgotten to bring the blue ice from his van.

  “This is ridiculous,” Jeanette said, “having to drive all this way just to go to Costco’s. Why can’t there be a coastside Costco’s?”

  There was no big-box retail anywhere near Rosarita Bay. Shockingly, their lone supermarket, the Safeway, had been shuttered without warning last fall, supposedly because it was underperforming. The town now had just two small upscale markets on Main Street, New Harvest Organic and Cuchi’s Country Store.

  “The way things are going,” Yadin said, “we might not even have New Harvest anymore.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Adelina thinks they might have to close.” Adelina, Rodrigo’s wife, was a cashier at the store.

  “I hate to say it, but it’s not a mystery why, with their prices,” Jeanette told him. “Only tourists can afford those prices. I can’t believe you used to do all your shopping there.”

  Early on, when Yadin had told Jeanette how much he was spending on organic groceries, she had been aghast, and then began taking him with her to Costco. Jeanette was, if anything, thrifty.

  “You haven’t heard anything more about the council vote, have you?” Yadin asked. “Your dad’s not optimistic.”

  “Siobhan thinks it’s a done deal.” Siobhan Kelly, the church pianist, was a sergeant on the Rosarita Bay police force.

  In last November’s election, residents had struck down Measure K, which would have raised the local sales tax by half a cent. The following month, the council sent out requests for proposals to outsource Rosarita Bay’s police services, and throughout the winter and spring there had been numerous study discussions, presentations, special meetings, and closed sessions, with San Vicente County’s sheriff and the city of Pacifica emerging as the top contenders.

  This morning at church, Siobhan had told Jeanette that the sheriff’s office, which already had a substation near Rosarita Bay, had pledged to hire five of the eight current police officers as deputies.

  “Would that include Siobhan?” Yadin asked Jeanette.

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “What about the library? It’s still safe, right?”

  Motions to contract out the library, or close it altogether, had appeared less urgent of late. The city had already cut the library’s staff in half, and there was strong public support to stem further reductions.

  “You’d know better than me,” Jeanette said.

  “How would I know?” Yadin asked.

  “Caroline.”

  “We don’t talk like that,” he said. In point of fact, they hadn’t talked much at all in the last month.

  “Don’t you?” she said.

  “We’ve only ever talked about poetry.”

  “This poetry thing, I’ll never understand,” Jeanette said.

  Caroline was Rosarita Bay’s library manager. Yadin dropped by the flat-roofed, one-story brick building at least once a week to use their computers, initially seeking financial and legal information, then online classifieds, then new recipes. A sign on the front door offered FREE INTERNET, NOTARY, PHONE, COFFEE, RESTROOMS, SMILES, AND IDEAS. He saw Caroline off and on there, as well as every other Sunday at church, and in March and April, after he heard her give a lecture on Gerard Manley Hopkins, they began talking more, but not about anything personal.

  They fetched Yadin’s van from the church parking lot, then convened at Jeanette’s house, where they did their laundry. Yadin didn’t have a washer/dryer.

  Jeanette rented a one-bedroom bungalow in Vasquez Canyon, in the hills above town. Originally the bungalow had been designed as a guesthouse on the two-acre property, which had a larger home for the owners, an elderly gay couple in San Francisco who rarely visited now. In exchange for being the property caretaker, Jeanette received reductions in her rent, a generous deal, since not much was required of her, other than scheduling the landscaper and seeing that the main house was maintained and occasionally cleaned (which she didn’t have to do herself).

  Their laundry took hours. Whereas Yadin was apt to throw everything into the drum willy-nilly, Jeanette was finicky about separating out colors and washing undergarments on delicate and hanging them to dry to give them longer life. In the meantime, they each did their bills, writing out checks and affixing stamps to envelopes, Jeanette double-checking Yadin’s figures and forms, especially for his mortgage payments and his credit card. Ironically, the best way for Yadin to rebuild his credit rating was to make regular purchases on credit. He’d gotten a credit card from a bank that was, in exchange for usurious fees and rates, bankruptcy-friendly. His limit on the card was three hundred dollars, and he charged no more than thirty percent of the limit, ninety dollars, on it each month, and then paid his bill in full upon receipt.

  Afterward, they made dinner. Yadin assembled another new recipe for a salad, a portion of which he served to Jeanette, who heated up a frozen lasagna for herself. They ate in the living room, then did the dishes and settled on Jeanette’s double bed to watch 60 Minutes and The Amazing Race. She received free satellite TV as part of her rent, but the hookup was only in her bedroom.

  The bungalow was a mere six hundred fifty square feet, and, as in Yadin’s cottage, all of the furnishings were secondhand, and nothing matched. Yet there was a vast difference in their gestalts. Jeanette’s house was light-filled and cozy, the décor artsy and eclectic. Everything was vintage. A worn velvet couch, a walnut stool, Moroccan poufs and kilim pillows on the floor, gauze curtains on the windows. There were linen doilies and silver bowls, vases and teapots, flowers and plants, mushroom lamps and a chandelier. On the walls—painted different shades, ranging from teal-blue to deep orange—hung a sari, a dreamcatcher, tapestries, watercolors of landscapes, Art Deco posters, and little collages made from postcards, Polaroids, and small reproductions. Some were Depression-era images, others snapshots of Jeanette and her family when she had been a child. The postcards featured landmarks in various European and Asian cities that she had once dreamed of touring.

  All of this could have been claustrophobic, yet each item had been so lovingly selected, each piece so thoughtfully arranged, that the overall effect was soothing, airy, inviting. The house had the charm of a bohemian apartment in bygone Paris or Greenwich Village (albeit without a speck of dust), suffused with whimsy and personality. It was, unequivocally, a home, one that Jeanette had shaped and curated continuously during the nine years she had lived in the bungalow. Yet, in many ways, it seemed to Yadin like someone else’s home—someone hipper, more adventurous, vivacious, someone who was a free-spirited, globe-trotting artist. It had stumped him, seeing the bungalow for the first time that New Year’s Eve. He had thought, getting to know Jeanette better, he would eventually be able to reconcile the playfulness of the layout with its architect, but he had yet to do so.

  As they watched TV on her bed, Jeanette picked at a bowl of microwave popcorn—a nightly indulgence, to go along with two goblets of red wine, although this evening she’d also had a gin and tonic to celebrate her promotion with him. Shifting positions on the bed, she winced and grunted—sounding exactly like her father.

  “Back hurt?” Yadin asked her.

  “A little.”

  “Want me to massage you?”

  “I’m okay.” She set the popcorn on top of a stack of magazines on her nightstand and readjusted her pillows. “Mary Wilkerson says they might give us panic buttons.”

  Yadin did not answer, because he had heard the sentence as, “Merry workers may kill some manic lessons,” and he was trying to parse it.

  “Are you listening to me?” Jeanette asked.

>   “Yes.”

  “Did you take your hearing aid out?”

  “I hate the thing,” he said. He seldom wore it; usually he could still hear well enough to get away without it. While the threshold for his right ear was already at 55 dB, on the edge of moderately severe, the hearing loss in his left ear was only mild for the moment.

  “I hate when you take it out,” Jeanette said. “Put it back in.”

  The problem with the hearing aid, a beige plastic in-the- ear model, was that it was cheap. Everything sounded tinny, mechanical, and compressed, particularly voices. The mic picked up noises from all directions. It wasn’t good when driving, or in the wind, or with music. It would occasionally whistle or squeal with feedback, and it was useless with a lot of background or competing noise, like a TV.

  He dug into his pocket, turned the hearing aid on, and inserted it into his right ear.

  “I never know if you’re ignoring me or just can’t hear,” Jeanette said.

  “My plan all along, keep you guessing. What were you saying?”

  “Corporate might issue us panic buttons. You know, the portable ones you wear around your neck, like for old people who can’t get up.”

  “Why?” Yadin asked.

  “The French guy.”

  “What French guy?”

  “The rich French guy, the one who raped the housekeeper in New York.”

  “I didn’t hear about this,” Yadin said.

  “How could you not? It happened last week. It’s been all over the news.”